


My Name is Sun

by Delatrista



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:07:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 80,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27163612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delatrista/pseuds/Delatrista
Summary: Blake learns that heartbreak isn't as simple as falling in love with a ghost; it is falling in love with the idea of an impossible future.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna & Ruby Rose & Weiss Schnee & Yang Xiao Long, Blake Belladonna/Sun Wukong, Past Blake Belladonna/Adam Taurus - Relationship
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is greatly inspired by a Korean manga called Transparent Cohabitation, or My Boo, created by Jeongseo. It’s a beautiful work, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves the star-crossed lovers trope. While I have taken a huge amount of inspiration from the manga, I will also be taking certain liberties with the setting. You don’t need to have read the source material to understand the story I’m telling with Blake and Sun. But I still strongly encourage you to check out the original manga, as it is gorgeous and well-worth the read. I can’t speak highly enough of it.

_The street to Blake’s home was always empty._

_Her childhood neighborhood was a strange sort of urban forest. The houses there were packed closely together along the crumbling sidewalks, blocking in the inhabitants in strict, orderly rows. The shrubbery had been long forgotten by the adults who were too focused on more important matters than landscaping, left to reclaim the scant spaces of grass, barely trimmed away from the edges of the sidewalks._

_Telephone poles of rotting, blackened wood grew out of the earth like strange echoes of the trees they once were, their leaves and branches replaced with gleaming cylindrical transformers and thick wires criss-crossing across the backdrop of a perpetually cloudy sky. What few, actual trees that existed amongst the industrial landscape were tiny, spindly things, with dead leaves on their branches year-round and all kinds of litter strewn about their empty mulch-beds._

_She always traced every crack and fault line in the black asphalt as she walked down the faded yellow lines dividing the road in two. Green blades grew from beneath the pavement, snaking their way towards the weak sunlight filtering through the smog. She was intimately familiar with the decay, always studying the ground beneath her feet with an intensity that should have been unusual for a child of 7 years of age._

_She would walk down the center of that empty road most afternoons, unafraid of cars, with no-one else in sight. Always with her faded purple backpack slung over her shoulders, weighing down her steps with the books she always rented out from her school’s library. She would focus on that weight, and on avoiding the cracks in the road. The old saying, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” was one she took very seriously at that age._

**_“…It’s her again.”_ **

_The street to Blake’s home was always empty._

_Don’t look up, she would tell herself. There’s no-one there, she would think. No-one’s ever out here at this time, she would remember. And she was right; she had convinced herself that was the case._

**_“She looked at us.”_ **

_Blake’s eyes darted down to her feet._

_Her eyes were playing tricks on her. There was never anyone on her street._

_Two pleading stares burned into her cheek._

_She hated walking home from school. Her mother had been able to take her home for the last few weeks, and it had been going well. Blake hadn’t needed to stare at the cracks in the road that entire time— but then her mother’s work schedule changed. The school district’s shortage of teachers required her to stay longer, lingering in her office working on lesson plans for three more classes well into the evening hours, and Blake once again had to acclimate to the empty street._

**_“Hey.”_ **

_Blake paused._

**_“Can you hear me?”_ **

_The wind whistled loudly, stirring the fur of her ears with how close it was. They ached as she held them still._

_A dandelion was forcing its way out of the asphalt, just barely in bloom. Its spiked leaves spilled onto the black concrete, and the crown of the flower was a yellow pinprick at the top of its stem. She stared at it, transfixed._

**_“Come back! You know she can’t see us.”_ **

_That was right, Blake thought. She couldn’t see anyone on the street, or on the sidewalk. She was alone. She couldn’t feel the presence of someone stood close at her side. The sense of a face leering close towards hers was imagined; the expectant girl she saw out of the corner of her eye was just a figment of her imagination. The lingering chill on the surface of her cheek was from the cold spring breeze, and nothing more._

_She bent down to pluck at the dandelion’s stem, just as the shape of a hand reached towards her hair._

_The dandelion was a struggle to pull from its roots. She stayed bent for a moment, with her fingers clamped to its stem. A shadow, probably a cloud passing over the sun, hovered over her shoulder. A nonexistent voice continued to reason with its partner, asking them to stop their fruitless pleading._

**_“I could have sworn she recognized me…”_ **

**_“Don’t you think she would have said something if she did?”_ **

**_“But that’s the third time she’s looked right at us…!”_ **

_Blake’s ears strained to flick atop her skull. There was too much ambient sound, probably from the next street over, but her stubborn ears wanted to follow every noise she heard. They didn’t realize there was no sound to track, and they tried to listen to her imagination on instinct. It wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t truly hearing anything important to her, after all. Certainly no voices speaking to her. She fiddled with the weed in her fingers, and straightened her back. The breeze was gone. She continued down the road._

_Two shadows hovered at the corner of her eye, all the while._

_Her house was at the end of the street, the last in a long line of buildings, where the street and the telephone poles abruptly ended at the back of an old chainlink fence. Beyond the weak metal, an empty field of gravel and waist-height grass stretched towards the road before it, equally as neglected as her own street, the blank expanse set between its own row of houses, and barricaded from her part of the neighborhood by only that thin fence. The kids on her street liked to tie random trinkets to it. Balloon strings, shoelaces, and the like._

_Blake remembered when her family moved there, a little over a year ago at that time. Bouquets of flowers had been tied to the fence then, bright whites and pinks exploding across the gray landscape along with proper balloons, and plush stuffed animals._

_The street hadn’t been so empty in those early weeks. People would pass by her house every day, there to add to the growing pile. They would avoid the house across the street from hers, empty and purposefully forgotten as people’s eyes slid over it with carefully blank stares. Though it too had some flowers and balloons left on the decaying stairs leading to its front porch, it went largely ignored by the visitors to her street._

_That house was dark, Blake had always thought. The shadows clung to it, unable to venture too far from its front door. The white paint on its panelling was always flaking away, dusting the dead grass of its tiny front lawn like perpetually unmelted snowflakes. Its windows reflected faces that weren’t her own; she never peered inside, never tried to see its empty rooms, as a result._

_And neither did the people who came to the chainlink fence. At first, whole groups of people would come, and they would always leave something behind. An offering of some sort. But as the years wore on, the tide of visitors abated. For a while, there were still stragglers who wandered down the empty road. Ones who would still show up every couple of months. Then a few times a year. Then once a year. Then not at all. Blake would watch them through her curtains as they faced the house across the street from her in silence._

_The flowers would wilt, then turn dry and brown and dead, and then break away into the wind. The stuffed animals would grow limp and ragged in the elements. The paper cards would disappear._

_In the years to come, the fence and that dim house would be forgotten, swept gently underneath the consciousness of those who lived there._

_And no-one was on the street now. Blake was alone on the road._

_She hiked her backpack up her shoulders as she approached the fence._

**_“Stop it. We both know no-one can see us.”_ **

_Blake turned her back on the empty house. She turned to her right slowly, keeping her attention off of the sidewalk behind her, and the fence beside her, and walked off of the road, with all its cracks and weeds and fading paint. She crossed over the patch of grass of her lawn, and began to ascend the stairs to her front door._

**_“I still think she can.”_ **

_Maybe she could plant the dandelion, she wondered. She hadn’t wanted to kill it, after all. It was just a nice distraction. It was hard to find pretty things on her street, when she spent all her time looking at the pavement._

**_“What, are you gonna go to her house and ask?”_**

_Blake paused on the final step, her small hand raised towards the handle of the door, fingers just barely brushing the old knob. She turned on her heel. Her eyes flicked across the empty space in front of her._

_The shadows held their breath, and so did she._

_A car horn blared at the entrance to her street, and moments later an engine roared. Wherever the car was from, it raced away with its horn still sounding off. The sound of it lingered in the air like a warning, long after it had left the neighborhood. Blake stood still for another few heartbeats, waiting. Her ears were just as unflinching, perked high and alert._

_She didn’t know why her eyes darted towards the sidewalk across the street from her. A flicker of movement, perhaps a leaf blowing across the pavement, catching her unconscious attention? Maybe a stray neighborhood cat, curious about the pair of ears she had on her head which would match its own._

_She liked cats well enough, but just then, she didn’t want to find the one which may have caught her eye. She looked away just as quickly as she had startled, as though she hadn’t seen anything of importance. Which, of course, she hadn’t._

_She had a rule she never broke. She never looked to the dark house across from hers. She didn’t see the girls watching from the base of the house’s front porch, both eerily still and wide-eyed with the kind of hope that was only present after it had been shattered enough times in the past. Fragile and strained, looking at Blake as though she were their last chance. Both life-like and surrounded in a pale blue tinge, both with matching purple backpacks on their shoulders just like hers._

_If they were real, Blake probably could have been friends with them. They were her age, after all. She had read the newspaper when her father wasn’t looking and had seen their faces, seen the dates which spanned their lifetime. But ultimately, she only had a very active imagination._

_The street to Blake’s house was always empty. There were only ever shadows on the sidewalks._

**_“Fine. When do you think Dad’s going to come back…?”_ **

_She turned around, opened her front door, and entered her home without a word._

..:|:..

“…Do any of these properties stand out to you?”

Blake breathed in deeply. She turned her head away from the window, and away from the weak spring sunshine coming through the glass which radiated a chill into the small room. Her eyes drifted slowly forward, moving away from the past, and focused on the flimsy faux-wooden desk in front of her.

There weren’t any shadows here.

She cast her attention over the array of papers scattered over the surface in front of her, and shifted in her stiff plastic seat to give the impression that she was suddenly more invested in the previous one-man conversation the real estate agent in front of her had been carrying. 

The last she recalled, he had been telling her about a little “fixer-upper” in a tiny suburb just outside of Atlas City. She already knew she was going to pass on that; “fixer-upper” was code for, “This house barely passes safety inspections with a bribe, but we’re going to charge you three times the rent it’s worth anyways.” 

And besides, she didn’t want to be a newcomer in a tiny community, where everyone knew everyone’s business even if they tried to hide it. In her experience, new blood was always the talk of the town for a few months, and never quite settled in until enough time had passed. No, something like that was out of the question. The last thing she needed were eyes on her every move. That wouldn’t be possible in…what’s-its-name. Her eyes glanced through the sentences in front of her, while her mind tried, half-heartedly, to recall the name she’d heard the man utter. What was it…Latch-something, maybe?

She didn’t really care, in truth. She reached forward, grasping for the first file she could touch, a battered manilla folder at the top of the stack. She flipped the cover open, and made a great show of sorting throughout the various papers.

It was a studio apartment in the Sanus District of Atlas City. _Ritzy_ , she thought.

The Sanus District was one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the capital. It was completely antithetical to her upbringing. Perfectly manicured landscaping lining every street, lush trees shading the smooth sidewalks. Men and women in business suits marching through the streets with little concern for their surroundings. She’d seen plenty of movies filmed in that part of the capital to know what it looked like, despite it only ever existing on the screen in front of her. 

Heavens knew she’d never been to Atlas City at all, let alone the neighborhood where the CEOs, celebrities, and stock brokers called home. Why was it in the stack of potential places for her consideration? It would likely be astronomically out of her budget just based on location alone. She paused as she came across a few photos, and lifted one out of the stack.

It certainly fit the description of a studio apartment. The flooring was a thin-looking gray carpet, walls painted bone-white and cold. The rooms were empty; whatever furniture the previous owners had was now gone from sight. The small, low entryway had a closet set just across from the front door. A tiny kitchen and living room were combined in one open space. The kitchen counters lined the wall shared with the bathroom, and turned left to briefly border a staircase. 

She quirked an eyebrow as she took in the kitchen. The appliances looked updated, not ancient and uncleaned like she was expecting. She flipped to the next picture, displaying the bathroom right beside the front door. The room barely fit a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub— and shower, surprisingly. That combination was surely expensive.

But it had a high, vaulted ceiling in the living space. There was a loft for the bedroom, accessible by the stairs in the back corner of the living room, with a line of windows on the far wall. A pair of sliding glass doors led into a walled-in backyard, where there was a small orange deck raised above a patch of grass. Plenty of sunlight filtered into the apartment in the pictures.

Despite the cramped space, and the lack of any furniture in the apartment from the previous owner, Blake found herself unusually drawn to it.

She flipped back to the front page, intending to find the rent. 400 lien a month.

“This one,” she said. She didn’t look up from the papers, and shook the folder a bit. “I want this one.”

“…Okay,” said the agent. His voice raised ever so slightly. “We can arrange a viewing. If you would pass me the file, I can look at the availability—”

“No,” Blake interrupted. “I’ll sign. I want this one.”

She flipped back to the picture of the living room. It was taken from the entryway, affording a generous view of the height of the ceiling and the entirety of the backyard. It was a tiny space. The little patch of grass reminded her of her front yard from her childhood home. The gray cinderblock walls encasing it were tall, just barely allowing for the afternoon sun in the photo to shine down on the backyard. _It would be hard for anyone to climb those,_ she thought, absently.

After a few more seconds of scanning the picture, she looked up.

The balding man across from her was staring at her face, eyes darting across her expression. The upturn of his eyebrows and the way his jaw hung slack, as though he had forgotten what he was going to say to her, was amusing; but she didn’t smile. She reached out, holding the folder in her hand towards him. His thick fingers dug into the papers and yanked the file away, and he shook his head.

“You’re going to sign without even seeing the place in person?” He queried. He was leaving the door open for her, an escape route from the contract she was committing herself to. She didn’t even know how long the lease was for.

“Yes,” Blake replied.

An hour later, she was back in her motel room, bearing a contract with her signature on it. She’d be able to move into her brand new apartment within the week.

She threw herself onto the ancient mattress provided to her with a sigh, casting aside the folder containing her one-year lease towards the pillows somewhere behind her head. The springs groaned miserably underneath her weight, but she sank into the lumpy surface as if it were a cloud all the same. Her eyes traced the patterns in the ceiling above her, which looked, suspiciously, like varying degrees of water stains, before she shut them.

She was exhausted, and all she’d done was sit in an office and look at places to rent.

She laid there, silent, listening to the rumble of traffic outside of the building, the murmur of voices from the other denizens of the motel through the paper-thin walls. Her own heartbeat echoed in her ears, as they twitched beneath her bow.

For the first time in three years, she was alone.

It was a strange thing, to occupy a room and be the only living creature there. To hear only one person’s breath instead of two. To recognize only her voice, echoing inside of her head instead of the walls around her. 

Before, she was never by herself. Now…she wasn’t sure how to handle the empty space beside her that had always been filled by a solid presence. Her hands reached out, arms spread on either side, and her fingers grasped into the musty sheets. She breathed deep, taking in the air around her despite the delicate stench of dust and mold, and sunk into the welcome feeling of solitude.

She had taken a risk, moving halfway across the world, and cutting off her former life in the process. In the last few months, she had doubted if it was worth it. Doubted if she had made the right choice. In the dark as she laid under threadbare blankets, or drank from watered-down cups of coffee alone in a diner, she had wanted to turn around. The urge to _go back_ would rear its head, blaring red, and incessant as it reasoned with her. 

Things would be different if she returned, it would say. It would be better the sooner she went back. So many times she almost had, as she bounced from one hotel to another, still trying to hide her tracks even though she was desperate to return to where she came from.

But this was a new beginning for her. Avenues had opened up which she hadn’t had access to before. Places she could go, people she could speak to, without fear of saying the wrong thing. No-one would be watching her every move or judging her speech. No more heavy hands on her shoulders. She was _free_. She needed to hold on to that. Even if wrenching herself away had felt like tearing off a limb—

Blake sat up, and stars erupted across her vision as her eyes snapped open. She groaned as the veins in her temple pulsed, an unpleasant reminder that she hadn’t eaten yet that day.

She stumbled to her feet, and slowly padded to the entrance of her motel room. She checked over her appearance briefly in the mirrored closet door, carefully ignoring the dark circles beneath the bright amber of her eyes. She tugged on the bow fixed firmly at the crown of her head, tilting from one side to another, looking for any angle where a pair of cat’s ears would be visible beneath the ebony ribbon.

Finding no chink in her armor, she donned her boots and shrugged on a bulky, second-hand jacket. She checked her pockets, making sure she had her wallet and her motel key, before she opened her door and stepped onto the balcony outside her room.

The motel was set on the outskirts of Atlas City, just outside the capital’s borders. It was a run-down business on its last legs, just barely kept afloat by the various people who lived out of its rooms and the occasional, wayward traveller. Like herself, she thought sardonically. People traveling with no end in sight, with nowhere else to go. Just running until they weren’t able to move anymore. 

She pulled her room key out, along with the key for the rental car she was using until she could find something more permanent. 

As she was locking up her door, she heard the creak of metal, the stomping of feet ascending a flight of stairs. Blake looked over her shoulder at the noise. A pair were making their way up the metal staircase in question, whispering to each other intently. She turned on her heel, shoved her hands into her pockets, and made her way towards their direction.

It was a man and a woman, heads bent low and close to each other. The woman’s skin shimmered ever so slightly as she moved; an indication of some variety of scales dotted about her skin. At the top of the stairs, an older man sat, his arms dangling between his legs as he stared out over the parking lot. 

The sky above was churning with foamy gray clouds, looming with the potential of rain. It was uneventful, nothing more than the spring weather which rolled in every year; yet the man watched the sky as if bewitched by the ever-changing cloudscape. His clothes were as ragged and unkempt as the white beard on his face. Still, he seemed unbothered by how ineffective they were in protecting against the chill, completely ignoring the couple below him. As Blake approached, none of them spared her a glance.

Blake kept to the right side of the staircase once she was close enough, though she tilted to the side to allow the man and woman to move around her before she went down. As the pair reached the last couple of steps, the man met her eye, and nodded in thanks. Blake tilted her head forward. Neither of them acknowledged the old man sitting right before them. 

Blake didn’t react when the man and woman both walked through him like empty air.

She descended the stairs in silence, staying carefully away from the figure sitting on the top of the staircase. There was, after all, nothing to see.

Blake’s car was at the far end of the lot, where the entrance to the motel was. Once she reached her car, she was seized by a desire to turn; she did so, and her eyes trailed over the second floor of the motel, studying the deserted walkway. 

In the time it had taken for her to reach her car, the man and the woman had disappeared into whatever room was theirs, leaving the building to once again appear uninhabited to the outside viewer. Only the cars dotted around the expanse before it indicated anyone had chosen to live out of this place.

Blake studied the motel for a moment. It looked...not just neglected, but incredibly lonely, she realized. The vacancy sign jutting out in front of the office’s front door was lit bright green, likely on at all times, and beckoning to desperate travelers who took this often overlooked road to stay the night. Against the backdrop of the gray sky the miserable orange structure sat amongst the dead grass fields surrounding it, as if it had been carelessly dropped by a wandering giant, and forgotten. 

On the horizon, Atlas City loomed, a soft blue beacon to draw wayward pilgrims into its borders. That was where people had their sights set. Not this place, with it and its denizens left forgotten.

Her eyes trailed up to the top of the staircase, where the lone old man still sat. He didn’t look at her; his eyes remained on some point in the sky, known only to him. Her fingers stayed curled on the handle of the car door as she observed him. The slightest blue haze hovered around his shoulders like an afterimage, an echo of himself layered over his frame. She blinked once, twice, before she turned her head away, her eyes sliding off of him as easily as if she had been watching nothing more than a bird flying off. 

Or as if she had seen nothing at all. She got into her rented hatchback without an acknowledgement that she had seen anything other than empty space.

She didn’t think about him after that. She only wondered where the nearest fast food place was.

..:|:..

The city of Atlas was comprised of towering modern apartments, needle-like glass and steel monoliths teeming with the business dealings and the political machinations which determined the country’s fate, and various other engineering marvels. The prized, of course, was the Atlesian monorail, spanning the entirety of the city with raised, flowing tracks which criss-crossed across the open air. 

All of it blended together to form the capital’s beating heart; with concrete and cables as its skin and muscle. Streamlined roads and freeways were its veins and arteries, carrying the millions of citizens who kept the city alive along their asphalt paths with an efficiency which was a testament to human ingenuity. 

Downtown itself was a modern paradise, flourishing with white and gray skyscrapers and adorned in swathes of green life meant to make the city a more eco-friendly place to live. Diners, cafes, and shops were commonplace on the tiled sidewalks, meant to entice tourists and weary business workers alike. 

Every available space for shadows to gather was studded with cerulean, translucent lampposts, glittering like priceless jewels on the sides of the streets, every intersection dotted with holographic streetlights. Atlas City was a place of innovation, of progress; no expense was spared in making the sprawling metropolis a pinnacle of the future.

Blake had never felt more out of place in her life, as she stood across the street from her new apartment.

The Sanus District was a foreign planet, as far as she was concerned. There was _so much_ happening, a constant maelstrom which she found herself at the epicenter of. Sleek cars fresh off the assembly lines raced silently through the streets, guided by the translucent stoplights, which hummed ever so softly on the street corners. 

The citizens of Atlas who chose to walk to their destinations were uniformed in gray and navy tailored suits, and polished to a sheen in expensive accessories. On her drive into the neighborhood, she’d seen women with earrings and rings that likely cost more than her entire bank account. Men with watches that could pay for her paltry 400 lien rent several hundred times over, and shoes polished to a blinding sheen. She couldn’t help but gawk, as she drove well under the speed limit, at the surplus of wealth that she would be living amongst.

She had been to the apartment once over the course of the past week. To meet her landlord for the first time, to discuss the ground rules of the place. She was an older human woman, similarly adorned like her fellow Atlesian citizens, and clearly uninterested in anything Blake had to say beyond, “I understand.” 

The woman was, in fact, very much in a hurry to get the meeting over with. Not long after they had toured the two rooms of the apartment, she had asked if Blake had any further questions. Blake had answered with a short shake of her head. A minute later, she was bustled out of the building with a key shoved unceremoniously into her hand, and told to come back in two days for her move-in. With that brusque farewell taken care of, her landlord vanished into the flow of foot traffic.

Blake had a feeling she wouldn’t be seeing much of the woman…which suited her just fine. 

The apartment was surprisingly more spacious, in person. She hadn’t expected that to be the case, though she also hadn’t spent too long in the building to determine if that effect was going to last longer than her initial impression of being there. After all, it had only been just enough time for her landlord to gesture around the living room, show her how to lock and unlock the front door, and to sternly inform her that no gatherings of more than five people were to be held there.

Blake wasn’t going to question that. She didn’t even _know_ five people in Atlas City, let alone have the desire to invite that many people into her space.

Despite having been there already, that first excursion was different compared to _now_ , as she stood on the sidewalk, holding a cardboard box filled roughly halfway with what few trinkets she owned, and staring dumbly at the complex in front of her. Before, she had only visited it. Now, she was here to stay. A strange feeling gripped her chest when thought of that word. _Stay_.

**_“Don’t go!”_ **

She shook the feeling off as soon as she recognized its presence. She focused on the buildings across from her, instead. The apartments spanned the length of the block. Each building was painted a different shade of white and gray; hers was a stark white stucco, and each one had a smooth dividing wall which hid the front doors from the public view. Her bedroom windows faced the street; she could just barely make out the black curtains she’d hung above them from her vantage point.

With a sigh, she took a step around the back of her car. The box in her hands was the last of her meager belongings to be brought inside. Once that was done, then she could focus on her next move.

She crossed the street in silence, keeping her head lowered and her eyes on the clean pavement at her feet. As she walked, she noticed there were few cracks in the asphalt. _It’s too perfect,_ she thought. 

Once she reached the sidewalk, she ducked behind her dividing wall, avoiding the curious eyes of the pedestrians on the sidewalk, likely wondering why someone like her was there. The protection offered by the shadow cast from the barrier was comforting, especially after spending the day supervising the moving company carrying what scant pieces of furniture she’d gotten into the apartment. She took a small breath, and then went to the front door. 

A small wooden platform stood at her doorstep, the door itself a dark brown wood made of wide, horizontal panels. She shifted her box to her hip, moving to pull her house key out of her pocket. Once she had it, she carefully moved to unlock the door, and then nudged it open with her hip.

Then she stepped inside, and hooked her foot around the door, shutting it behind her. For the last time that day.

Blake stood for a moment, silent, and stared at the folded closet doors before her. 

The air was silent. It _buzzed_ against her skin, somehow loud with the lack of noise. She clutched her box close to her chest while her ears twitched beneath her bow, hunting for any sort of sound. 

Nothing. She was alone. Her shoulders sagged as anticipation left her in a quiet hush of breath.

Upon that realization, and the surprising relief that came with it, Blake wasted no more time. She kicked off her boots, leaving them propped next to the front door, stepped up the small step leading from her door into the entrance, and moved down the small hallway that opened into the living space. 

The pictures she’d seen in the real estate office couldn’t quite do the place justice, in person. Despite only being a studio, the apartment felt…larger, somehow. It may have just been an illusion, crafted with its two-story ceiling and plenty of windows placed throughout the walls; but it didn’t seem like a place that was only worth 400 lien per month. Blake moved over to the kitchen, where a small dining set divided it from the space designated for the couch, tucked into the back corner of the room. 

She set her box down on the dining table, then looked out over the space before her.

Her couch was crammed against the junction of two walls, and partially obscured by a pile of empty boxes which had previously contained its parts. The carpeted floor in front of it was bare, and a small television stand was placed at the end of the kitchen counters, against where the stairs began. A small black box sat atop the surface, with a dimmed blue dome capping it. The projector for the television screen which would hum into existence at the press of a button. 

The sliding glass doors from the pictures were set in the wall directly between the space of the couch and the stairs, and through them Blake could look out onto the tiny courtyard. A tall, faded blue door, which hadn't been visible in the real estate photos, was placed into the cinderblock walls in the far left corner, with a small gap underneath it, which led into an alleyway between her apartment and one of her neighbor’s.

She stared out into the backyard for some time, fixated on the green plot beyond the glass.

She heard quiet laughter, both her own and not, as she looked at it. The solid feel of dirt pressed beneath her fingers. They twitched, and a leaf made itself known as it brushed against the back of her hand. She had always enjoyed the feel of nature against her skin. Red blossomed behind her eyes, petals unfurling in warm sunlight, and clear yellow eyes smiled at her from underneath the brim of a wide hat.

Blake shook her head.

She didn’t need any more ghosts haunting her. She moved for the staircase, shaking the wisps off of her mind.

Clear glass formed the railing, as well as the bannister along the loft-space. The ceiling of her bedroom was low, allowing just enough space for an empty bookshelf which was squeezed between the glass fence and the cheap desk she had put into the corner. Her bed was set directly across from the stairs, one side of it flush with the far wall, and a narrow cardboard box serving as a nightstand was shoved against it. A shelf and a rack were screwed into the wall along her bed, and what few clothes she owned either hung from plastic clothes-hangers, or were folded atop the shelf. The windows took up a majority of the far wall, affording a generous view of the road below.

She didn’t bother looking out there, however. She crawled across her mattress, an ancient thing she’d found at a local flea market and covered in drab gray sheets, to shut the black curtains she’d hung in the space.

A dim hush fell across the bedroom. Blake flopped backwards and landed on her back with a soft, “Oof.”

She stared up at the ceiling, still visible from the evening sun shining through the windows downstairs.

What should she do next, she wondered?

There was so much to be done; she needed a job. She was going to burn through what meager savings she had managed to accumulate over the last three years in break-neck pace otherwise. She probably needed to get a car— 

_No_ , she thought, _not probably_. She _did_ need to get a car. She needed a way to leave the city if it ever came to that. Her rental car was due to be returned the next day. She also needed to get groceries; but that wasn’t her most pressing concern. She could barely cook as it was. Worst case scenario, she’d be heating pre-made meals for the next few months.

She rolled to her side, staring out through the glass fence to the living room below. After a moment, she sat up, then moved to the desk at the foot of her bed, and the cheap wooden chair she’d gotten at the same sale as her mattress. One of the legs was shorter than the rest, allowing for it to rock with every movement she made on it, but it served its purpose well enough. She sat crosslegged in it and reached for her Scroll, a phone and computer compacted into a thin glass slate, and the only object on the desk’s surface.

“Search for car dealerships,” she directed quietly, and her Scroll lit up bright blue as a hologram flickered to life over its surface. The projection wavered every few seconds, distortions rippling through the minuscule lines of light comprising the images it was showing; her Scroll was many models behind, its projector lens cracked. There was likely more damage to its circuitry than she could be bothered to inspect. Ultimately, the thing worked, and that was all that mattered to her.

The system scrolled through lists of dealerships at a slow pace, allowing her to read through their names and descriptions at her leisure. She dismissed each one she saw; they were well beyond her price range, each business sleek and modern to fit the Atlesian aesthetic, with cars listed for sale at prices that could buy her a penthouse alone in this city.

As the minutes ticked by, she grew more dismayed. Would she not be able to afford a car at all? She was well past fifty dealerships, and none of them were affordable. She hated that thought; if she needed to leave the city, she wanted to have the option to do so under her own control, no public transport involved. Something like that could be traced. She could be recognized more easily that way. She directed the Scroll to move quicker down the list, though the price ranges weren’t dropping as the list did.

But then something caught her eye. She paused the scrolling list in its tracks, and her finger hovered over the small, cerulean-tinged image of a wood-clad building. Her ears perked up, straining against her bow. 

_“Patchwork Auto,”_ was the dealership’s name.

Blake read through the sample of cars available underneath the name of the shop; far older and far, far cheaper than the other dealers she’d seen so far.

_This could be the place,_ she thought. She selected the picture of the building.

It was well reviewed, despite its ramshackle nature. She scanned through a list of previous customers praising the owner, a man named Taiyang, and his workers for their politeness and expertise in their field. It was also, much to her surprise, located in Atlas City.

The catalog of cars they had on site certainly weren’t the polished, modern machines she knew were common in her neighborhood. They were much older models; but at first glance she didn’t see anything immediately wrong with them, aside from a few which had mismatched mirrors and door colors.

Perhaps that was where the name “Patchwork” came from, she wondered, amused.

She glanced at their office hours, then. They were closed for the evening; but they would be open starting at 9 the next day. 

That settled it. She would be there right as they opened at 9, and hopefully close on a car by the time she needed to return her rental in the afternoon. It was optimistic, but she figured she had a good chance of getting a car that day, judging from the amount the shop had listed on their website.

She just hoped she could afford what they had.

..:|:..

The next morning, Blake was out the door before the sun had fully risen through her windows. She had dressed herself to be as unassuming as she could, swathed in a baggy sweater and black jeans, only caring about her appearance enough to ensure the bow on her head was sufficiently covering her ears, and that the tendrils of her black hair were tousled over where a pair of human ears should have been on her skull. 

With that protection ensured she pulled on her boots, locked the front door behind her, and got into her rental car parked across the street from the apartment. She pulled out her Scroll as she waited for her car to warm, and plugged in the address for the dealership. 

Once that was settled, she buckled in, and wove into the morning traffic.

Atlas City was massive, she was coming to realize. It was a size she wouldn’t have been able to fully appreciate without being amongst the towering skyscrapers, or the sprawling city blocks which spanned miles in every direction. And even at this early hour, people were out in droves. Going their own separate ways, thousands of different lives with thousands of different destinations. As she drove along the freeways, with only the quiet hum of the heating in her car for company, Blake felt like she was just another cell among trillions of others, flowing within the veins of roads that spanned the urban expanse.

It took her half an hour to even begin to near her destination. 

The further she went, the landscape began to shift before her eyes. Steel and concrete melting into brick and mortar veneers, reflections of glass vanishing from the fronts of the buildings in the blink of an eye. On one street, the downtown’s holographic streetlights were planted proudly. At the next intersection, she realized they were beginning to disappear from the sidewalks. Their older, electricity-powered counterparts stood in their places, proud and bent and misshapen, with more of their bulbs burnt out than not in their wrought-iron posts. 

They were the kinds she was familiar with. She hadn’t seen the translucent models until her late teens, having grown up with these sorts of constructs in her neighborhood. The bright yellow streetlights were always flaking paint onto the road in strange imitations of rainfall, she remembered. Some were in a constant state of flashing in alternating patterns of red and amber. 

Where the citizens of Atlas were polished, with not a hair out of place, the pedestrians she was beginning to pass were a clash of colors and styles. There was no unspoken dress code here, no social cues to follow. She often glanced out of her window to sneak glances at the spontaneity, which greatly contrasted Atlas City’s sense of order. The sleek functionality soon vanished entirely from view, replaced with more ramshackle and lively complexes.

As she came to a stop at one intersection, she noticed a sign was strung on wires between two different buildings on the street corners. _“Welcome to Mantle_ ” was emblazoned on the white background in bright orange letters. 

It was a fitting name; Atlas City had been set atop of Mantle’s foundations, like a prized trophy kept constantly polished to a sheen, while the surface it rested on went neglected. That surface had been the country’s original capital, until it began to crumble beneath the burgeoning economic progress that the new additions to the city were making. Atlas City eventually subsumed Mantle entirely, leaving the two to be considered two separate entities, despite existing in the same general landscape. 

In stark contrast with the new capital, however, Mantle was alive with color. The various brick facades of apartment complexes and storefronts were splattered with spray-paint artworks, and bright curtains that the locals hung from their door frames blurred together as she drove past. She went through winding main streets, and took some of the back roads when the pavement was too treacherous for her car to traverse. The cracks in the asphalt here were numerous and deep. She felt much more comfortable amongst the decay.

Eventually, Blake quietly steered her vehicle into a narrow driveway, and the guttural purr of her engine softened as she backed into a parking spot across the front door of the main building. 

Patchwork Auto was situated between two ancient, seemingly abandoned brick complexes. Various wooden planks were nailed in front of the doorways and the windows of each facade, and overgrown grass spilled out from beneath the sidewalks leading up to them. 

There didn’t seem to be a lot of space for the shop to exist; instead, it seemed like it had been squeezed into the lot by force, just barely small enough to make the space work. The attached office building— more a shack than anything else, in her opinion— was paneled in wide wooden planks, and were painted a brilliant yellow color. The yellow seemed fresh, vibrant. The glass-paneled door’s white paint, however, was quickly fading. The garage itself only had three lanes; one aisle-way for oil changes, one for auto-body repair, and one for brakes, each marked with a wooden sign that had the labels carved into their faces and hung above the closed doors.

Blake removed her key from the ignition, and got out of her car. She glanced around the barren parking lot, and then pulled her Scroll out of her pocket. _8:57_ , the clock told her.

She turned slowly, leaning against her car, and took in the surrounding area. Planter boxes lined the sidewalk in front of the building, bursting with color in shades of pinks and yellows and purples in the spring season, while hanging baskets dangled from the lip of the roof between each garage door. Tendrils of green leaves cascaded from the wicker containers, reaching for the blemished concrete with delicate fingers. 

A flicker of movement, somewhere in front of her, caught her attention. Her eyes snapped forward, looking to one of the abandoned buildings. 

A young woman stood just before the road. As Blake looked on, the woman repeatedly dipped her bare foot down towards the street, before drawing it back. Strands of her curly hair brushed in front of her profile, obscuring her face; but Blake noticed the blue hue which clung to her thin shirt. She glanced away quickly.

She stood in the waking sunshine for some time, alone, until another car pulled into the dealership’s driveway.

It was a blue pickup truck, spotted with brown patches of rust along the bottom, and covered in dents everywhere else along its surface. Blake turned to watch it over the roof of her own car as it pulled into the lone spot to the right of the front door, in front of the office window. She glanced down at her Scroll again. _9:38,_ it said.

The door of the truck clicked open, and Blake stood still as a man emerged from the driver’s side. He didn’t seem to be alone; a woman’s voice rose up from the passenger side, as well.

The man immediately looked at her, though, and he smiled bright enough to hurt her eyes with his cheerfulness. 

“Good morning!” he called, and began to approach her. “Man, I’m sorry to keep you waiting! We don’t usually get anyone until after 10.”

He was tall, she noted, with blond hair that had a perpetual cowlick bouncing at the crown of his skull. His blue eyes were warm, though, and he seemed unthreatening.

“Are you Taiyang?” she asked, recalling the name of the owner she’d read on the dealership’s website.

He came to a stop in front of the hood of her car, and nodded. “That’s me,” he said. Then he looked over his shoulder. “Yang! Could you open up?”

“On it!” the female voice called back.

“My daughter,” Taiyang explained to her with a smile. A moment later, a girl emerged from in front of his truck, with equally bright blonde hair to match her father’s. The cowlick seemed to be an inherited trait, as well. She waved when she noticed Taiyang and Blake looking at her, then produced a key from her pockets, and let herself into the dealership’s office.

Taiyang turned back to Blake, who was slow to meet his eyes.

“So, how can I help you, miss…”

“Blake,” she supplied. 

“Blake,” Taiyang repeated, and he gestured towards the shop. Blake moved to follow him, keeping a few steps behind his shoulder as they went.

They reached the faded white door, and Taiyang held it open for her to walk through the entryway before following her in. Blake had to resist the urge to halt in her tracks and gawk at the room around her.

The office space looked like the three filing cabinets lined against the right-hand wall had thrown up their contents throughout the room.

Stacks of multi-colored files were strewn across the floor, papers piled high enough to lean precariously to their sides which marked out a strange sort of path where the carpeted floor was visible, and snaked from the front door to behind the lone desk in the center of the room, before branching off to the door on the left-hand wall which, presumably, led into the garage. One other door sat in the opposite wall from the front door, with a curtain drawn over the glass in its face.

Blake was starting to think this may have been the wrong place to consider. How did they get anything done here?

“Um…” she leaned away from a tower of files when she realized she was brushing too close, “I’m looking for a car.”

She turned around just as Taiyang shut the front door. He hummed at her answer, and carefully skirted past her towards the front desk.

“Well we’ve got plenty of those,” he said. He pulled a pink folder from somewhere on the desk’s surface. “Anything you have in mind?”

_One that works,_ was what she wanted to say. 

“Not really,” she answered. “I didn’t get the chance to look through your catalog last night.”

Taiyang quirked a brow at her response, but said nothing. He flipped through the folder for a few moments, and Blake crossed her arms as she waited for what he would say next. 

A series of clangs burst from the shared wall between the garage and the office. She startled, and fought her ears to keep them still as they equally struggled to pivot towards the noise. Taiyang didn’t react to the noise, but straightened his back while the banging continued.

“Well, let’s go see if anything catches your eye,” he offered. He gestured towards the door which led into the garage, and Blake moved to follow him.

To her surprise, it stretched further back into the property than she originally believed. She figured two cars could easily fit into each aisle, three if they were really packed in. One of the aisles _did_ have three cars lined up in it; the other two only had a single car, elevated above the concrete floor on hydraulic jacks.

All three doors had been opened to the parking lot, allowing the natural light to flood into the lanes. As Taiyang led her along the wall further into the garage, Blake caught sight of the girl from earlier sprawled out underneath one of the three cars— or at least, she presumed it was the girl. All she could really see were a pair of boots sticking out from beneath the vehicle.

At the back, there were another three sets of garage doors, similarly opened to an expansive, paved yard. A few aisles of cars were laid out, in multitudes of colors ranging from greens, to grays, to reds. 

“Here’s our current selection,” Taiyang explained. “We get most of our cars from out-of-city auctions, but all of them get personally inspected and repaired here.”

Blake scanned the lanes, but nothing immediately jumped out to her.

“Any that you recommend?”

Taiyang chuckled. “That depends on what you need,” he answered. “What’re you looking for?”

They wandered down one of the lanes, and she continued to look over the cars with slight interest.

“Honestly? Just something that works,” said Blake, finally giving in to the sarcastic comment from earlier.

The man’s chuckle turned into a snort, then a laugh. 

“Ha! Well, at least we know the bar’s low,” he said between his laughter.

They meandered through the lines of cars for a few minutes, while Taiyang continued to give her the sales pitch that all retailers were required to know. Blake didn’t mind it from him, somehow; he seemed too friendly for it to be an act, and she liked having someone talking to her about something as mundane as gas mileage and the lifespan of tires. It wasn’t something she got to experience every day.

“Dad,” a girl’s voice called out, as they were nearing the back of the lot, which was walled in by the back of a narrow brick building. Taiyang’s daughter… _Yang_ , Blake recalled, placing the voice to her memory. Both she and Taiyang turned to face the source of the commotion. “Someone’s here for a drop off!”

“Ah. I’ll be right back,” Taiyang told her, and he gestured towards the surrounding vehicles. “Take your time, have a look around on your own! No need for me to hover your shoulder.”

He was gone before she had a chance to acknowledge what he’d said.

Blake stood amongst the vast selection of cars, utterly lost.

She didn’t really care what one she got. She just wanted it to work, truly; and the cheaper, the better. She moved to wander on her own throughout the lanes, and hoped she looked like she knew what she was looking for as she peered into car windows, or took time to inspect the clearness of their mirrors. She also kept an eye on her bow; so far, it had stayed in place. 

As she was looking into one such mirror, her ears twitched ever so slightly beneath the ribbon as if they knew she was looking for them. She scowled, and schooled them into stillness before she straightened her back, intent to continue her performance.

She was met with a girl watching her from over the rim of the mirror, instead. Blake blinked, then her eyes unfocused. She was ready to let her attention slide off of the girl entirely; her pale skin was a hint that Blake shouldn’t be noticing her presence. But as she began to step back, intending to flee to another corner of the lot, she took a chance to study the space around the girl’s figure. No blue haze in sight, she noticed.

“Um,” she said.

“Hi,” the girl said back.

Neither of them moved.

Blake’s eyes darted over the girl’s slim frame, taking in her dark hair, and the bright red of her fleece jacket. Her hands were stuffed into the jacket’s pockets, and one of her feet kicked against the pavement as she studied Blake in kind. Her legs were encased in tall, bulky black boots, laced up to the bottoms of her knees. Her eyes then roamed to the girl’s face, finally settling on her peculiar gray eyes.

“Are you looking to buy?” asked the girl.

“Yes,” Blake answered.

She watched as the girl’s face split into a grin. 

“Awesome,” she said. She tilted her head. "Want me to show you around? You seem kinda lost. No offense."

Blake glanced down towards the mirror she had been investigating. 

"...Sure," she said slowly.

The girl led her throughout the parking lot, gesturing to various cars and not pausing in her descriptions to give Blake a chance to take in the information. She nodded along dutifully with what she was hearing, stared at the cars as the girl pointed out various unseen parts underneath their hoods, and kept her mouth shut. 

Eventually, they stopped. The girl regarded her for a moment with her arms crossed over her chest. Then, she gestured back towards the garage. “There's one that my sister just finished the other day. Wanna see it?”

Blake wondered for a moment about who that sister was, before she nodded. At least she was being given a direction to look in. 

She followed the beacon of the girl’s crimson jacket to the other end of the yard, where a line of cars was set against the wall of one of the buildings which bordered the shop. It was the same building which she’d witnessed the bare-footed woman in front of, Blake recalled. She wondered if that woman was the reason the place had been left to rot. She tilted her head skyward, taking in the boarded up windows which lined the wall overlooking Patchwork’s shop. It must have been an apartment complex of some kind.

She was drawn out of her musing when the girl stopped in front of a faded red hatchback, the color reminiscent of a dying sunset. Or of rust, if Blake were being honest. The girl pulled a hand out of her pocket, and patted the hood of the car. 

“This is it,” she announced.

Blake stood in silence, staring at it. It was…certainly a car, she thought. She wondered if she was expected to seem more impressed. 

“Does it run?” she asked. She _almost_ cringed at that; the girl didn’t seem fazed at the blunt question, however.

“Like a dream,” the girl replied. “Yang’s got the magic touch. It was marked for the scrapyard when she and Dad found it at an auction a few years back, but she wanted to give it a shot. Honestly, the cylinders were the worst part, though the suspension was pretty bad too—”

“Wait,” Blake interjected. She glanced towards the shop, remembering what the girl had said about her sister finishing a car. Her mind was already trying to layer the tall blonde girl she’d seen earlier atop the skinny, pale, ebony-haired one in front of her. “Your sister’s the blonde in the garage? Your dad’s—”

“Taiyang,” the girl answered before Blake could finish. She fixed her wide, clear stare on Blake for a moment, scrutinizing her. Blake clenched her fingers as she waited to be rebuked. The girl tilted her head to the side, and then she grinned. “I don’t look anything like them, do I?”

Blake shook her head. She was already getting ready to apologize for not realizing it sooner.

“I get it a lot. Don’t worry about it.”

Blake would worry herself into an early grave on her own accord despite the offered platitude, but she appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.

The girl studied her for a moment, her eyes darting across her face curiously. Blake grit her teeth behind her lips, silently bidding her ears to stay still beneath the scrutiny. They always did like to betray her at the most inopportune moments.

“My name’s Ruby,” the girl finally announced. She leaned against the hood of the car.

“Blake,” she gave back, reflexively. Ruby smiled at her, and Blake felt an infectious urge to return the expression. She tamped it down before it could take effect.

The girl— Ruby— hopped up onto the hood to sit on top. Her legs dangled off the edge, the tips of her boots not quite managing to brush the concrete.

“Nice to meet ya, Blake,” Ruby said. 

Blake strode towards the driver’s side door, and peered inside the car. It looked clean enough, with its carpeted seats clear of debris. The electronics were more than a bit dated; there were actual knobs and dials instead of the holographic touchscreens that were commonplace these days in even the cheapest models. 

“So…what do you do for work?” Ruby asked. She kicked her heels against the metal beneath her. Blake wondered if that was going to break the car in some way.

Blake didn’t look away from the interior of the car as she answered. “I don’t have a job, right now.”

She walked around to the trunk. At this point, she was just trying to look like she knew what she was doing. She leaned down towards the bottom of the car. Nothing looked like it was going to fall out from underneath if she tried to drive it. It was enough of an inspection for the standard she needed to meet. She glanced towards Ruby. 

“How do I buy?” she asked.

Ruby blinked her wide, gray eyes in surprise. They stared at one another from around the side of the car. The longer Blake looked at her, the more her eyes seemed to shimmer in the sunlight. _Like silver,_ she thought. Or like twin moons, wide and full in bemusement. She must not have been expecting for Blake to be so quick to choose a car so soon. She sat there on the hood, studying Blake as if she had grown a second head.

“You’re just gonna buy? You don’t want to test drive it or anything?” Ruby sounded disbelieving as she asked those questions. Blake shook her head.

“I need something by this afternoon,” she explained, “and I feel like I can take you at your word. If you say the car’s good, then I’ll go with it.”

Ruby continued to stare at her like she’d announced she was an alien.

Then her eyes narrowed, full moons closing to crescents.

“This isn’t for, like, anything illegal?” she asked. Then she shook her head. “No, wait— you wouldn’t tell me if it was. Would you? Because if it is, we’re gonna have a problem. Are you trying to find a getaway car? I mean, at least you’re not carjacking, but I’d like it if you didn’t use something we sold you for that—”

Blake was smirking before she realized it. She couldn’t stop the corner of her lips from raising upwards, however, as the girl carried on in front of her. 

She interjected once Ruby paused for air. She had her hand raised, index finger pointed upwards as she drew in her breath. “I promise I’m not doing anything illegal.” The girl regarded her curiously. “My rental is due by this afternoon, and I don’t have any other way home. I just moved here, and I need a car that works. Nothing more.”

That seemed to appease Ruby enough. She lowered her hand, and Blake walked back to the front of the car.

“Well,” Ruby said. She crossed her arms. “I guess I’m just not used to someone wanting to buy a car so quickly.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

Ruby nodded.

“I mean it, this car’s going to run great,” she said, enthused. She patted the hood beneath her. “Yang’s been working on it for years. She can get anything going again. She’s gonna flip when she finds out you bought it!”

_Good for her_ , Blake thought sarcastically. Then her eyes widened as a hand curled around her wrist, pulling…the remembered sensation of _twisting_ rippled underneath her skin— and she startled when Ruby hopped off the hood, with her fingers gently curled around Blake’s hand, and unceremoniously dragged her towards the garage. 

“Hey, hold on a second, let go—”

Blake’s protest went unnoticed.

“Dad,” Ruby called into the building, where more clatters and bangs were ringing out to greet them. “We’ve got a buyer!”

Blake scowled as she was pulled along. Ruby was far stronger than she appeared, and she stumbled to keep up with the pace. She felt rather like a toy on a string, being yanked along by a guileless child, as Ruby maneuvered her back under the cover of the garage. 

More people had come into the shop since Blake and Taiyang had gone to look at the cars; there were easily five or six workers, all in various contorted positions as they inspected the vehicles in the aisles. As she snuck glances around the shop, she saw the moment the blonde girl, Yang, took notice of the two newcomers barging into the garage. 

She looked up from the engine of a car she was bent over, her blonde hair swept back into a thick ponytail. She grinned as she put down a tool in her hand and walked over to her sister, and her sister’s captive.

“Making friends, huh?” she asked Ruby, who stuck her tongue out indignantly at what seemed to be a friendly jab, and then looked towards Blake. Her lavender eyes widened slightly in recognition.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said, and stuck her hand out in the space between them. “Sorry I didn’t introduce myself earlier. When my dad gives an order, you’ve gotta follow it. I’m Yang.”

Blake stared at her offered hand. Grease and other unknown grime were smeared across her palm and splattered up the expanse of her forearm. Her eyes flicked back up to meet the girl’s. One hand stayed in Ruby’s grasp. The other hung limp at her side.

“This is Blake,” Ruby introduced, after a silent, stretched out moment. Blake noticed, out of the corner of her eye, Ruby gesturing in her direction with her free hand, as if it weren’t obvious enough who she was speaking about.

Yang’s hand lowered. She smiled sheepishly, and stuck that same dirty hand onto the back of her neck. 

“…Right,” she said. “Well…it’s nice to meet ya!” 

Blake nodded, and glanced around the expanse of the garage. The five or six other people that she had seen were still present, each working on various cars dotted around or positioned at work stations. She didn’t see a single blond cowlick, aside from the girl in front of her. She wondered if Taiyang had heard his daughter. Perhaps she should go look for him herself. She needed to be leaving soon, to drop off her rental.

At her side, Ruby shifted from foot to foot. Blake glanced at her, and then down to the hand still holding her arm. Ruby seemed to notice where her attention was focused, and her fingers finally unfurled from around Blake’s wrist. She pulled it back, and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I like your bow!” Yang eventually offered.

“Thanks,” Blake murmured. Then she looked to Ruby.

“Is your dad in the office?” she asked. “I’d like to get the paperwork sorted for the car.”

Ruby’s eyes darted to the closed door separating the garage and the office. “Probably,” she said. She nodded towards it, and stepped forward as if to lead the way.

Blake was already heading in that direction on her own.

“…She’s weird,” she heard Yang attempt to whisper, though the sound carried easily in the open space between them, even with the fabric of her ribbon to muffle it. Blake didn’t flinch at the insult. She’d heard plenty worse without her bow to mask it.

When she entered the office, Taiyang was there as Ruby had predicted, sat at the desk in the middle of the room. He was reading through something on a small computer that was balanced precariously on the edge of the surface; Blake could see an article scrolling slowly upward through the clear glass screen. He didn’t glance up despite the commotion which rang through the small space, flooding in from the open door leading to the garage.

She shut the door behind her quietly, and waited until he took notice of her.

It didn’t take long. His eyes darted up from the words he was reading, and he met her eyes through the screen. He sat up straighter, then gestured towards an armchair set beside the door she had closed.

“You’ve got something in mind?” he asked as Blake settled into the chair. She sunk further into it than she was expecting, and struggled to straighten herself out.

“Yes,” she said. Then she told him she was ready to buy.

Taiyang seemed just as taken aback by that as Ruby had. When he asked her the same question about test-driving it first, Blake shook her head.

"One of your daughters helped me pick it out,” she explained. “I need a car by this afternoon. As long as it works, I’m fine.”

Taiyang blinked at her. Then he smiled. “I take it you met Ruby, then,” he said. Blake nodded.

“Well…I’m glad to hear it. Which one did you decide on?”

Blake went on to describe the rust-colored car she had done her cursory inspection on, as well as the sparse story Ruby had told her about her sister working on it for such a long time. Taiyang nodded once she was finished.

“It’s definitely an older car, and it’s going to have some issues because of it,” he said. “But if you’re sure…I can get the paperwork put together in an hour.”

Blake was sure about it. 

An hour later, as promised, and Taiyang had a file of forms for Blake to read through, fill out, and sign. 

She took the proffered pen from his hand, along with the manilla folder the papers were in, and watched out of the corner of her eye as Taiyang regarded her curiously.

“So I take it you’re not from around here?” he asked. He stood in front of her, not close enough to be interrogating her with hostile intent, but questioning her all the same.

Blake shook her head as she bent over the folder in her lap. “I just moved here yesterday,” she explained.

Taiyang was quiet for several moments after that. Blake looked up from the papers, sensing another question coming. “Coming from somewhere interesting?”

_Somewhere interesting_ , she repeated silently. Bitterly. She thought of railroad tracks, and the smell of smoke. She thought of endless, thick forests and forgotten city blocks, with warehouses filled with cargo containers. Of bright blue eyes staring at her in the dark. 

She glanced up to meet Taiyang’s stare. In that moment, they were too much like the ones in the back of her memories; she turned her head back down to her lap.

“Not really,” she murmured. “I’ve…kind of been all over the place.”

The silence fell back in to fill the void left by their words. Blake didn’t continue studying the papers. She stared between the sentences on them, seeing them but not reading. 

She hoped Taiyang would leave her to fill out the forms in peace. The real estate agent hadn’t cared enough about her background to ask about it. Once he’d gotten over his surprise at her willingness to sign on the apartment, all he’d wanted was to confirm her down payment. She missed that apathetic attitude.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Taiyang finally said. It was as though he could hear her thoughts. “If you need anything, just holler. I’ll be in the shop.”

And then he was gone.

Blake...didn’t like the silence now.

It settled in like a heavy blanket in the small room. Falling over her shoulders, suffocating and dark. Like her childhood bedroom, cramped and closed in as she stared out the lone window to the other side of the street, before she learned not to look at the empty house. Or like the nights when— when _he_ had been unhappy. Blake felt a shudder ripple down her spine. She couldn’t think of that name. She _couldn’t_. She hadn’t thought it in a year. She wouldn’t do it now.

But the uneasy silence persisted despite her resolution, given awareness by the unintended mention of where she'd come from. Before she’d left, Blake was most familiar with it as a looming portend of danger. The reminder that she’d come from somewhere wasn’t one that she had wanted to confront just yet. She fought to confine it back into its box in her mind, to shut the lid and go back to ignoring it as easily as she did the shadows on the sidewalk.

Eventually, the door to the garage cracked open. Blake looked up to the side to see Ruby’s head peering through the gap. 

“Hi,” she greeted, before stepping into the room. She shut the door behind her, and Blake turned her attention back to the forms.

She registered Ruby moving towards the desk, avoiding the stacks of papers marking out the pathway from the door as she went. A chair creaked, and a drawer squeaked open. Blake lifted the folder up, and finally began the task of actually understanding the information that was on the forms which Taiyang had left in her care.

Ruby, in the meantime, was fiddling with something, known to Blake only due to small clicks sounding from the direction of the desk as she read in peace. She flipped through the various sheets of paper for a few minutes, occasionally pausing when she came across something that seemed like she should remember.

“So! I was thinking, about what we talked about earlier…”

Blake didn’t pause in her perusal of the documents, and hummed to indicate she was at least partially paying attention to the girl speaking to her.

“And I know you said you just moved here…and that you don’t have a job.”

Blake winced at how much the down payment was going to be for this. _Even a used car goes for this much?_ She thought miserably. She could cover it; even if she didn’t really _want_ to. She flipped through a couple of the pages, reading through the various clauses with absent-minded focus.

“And, I know Dad’s been looking for someone to come in here and clean up the office…in case you haven’t noticed, it’s kind of a mess.”

“Uh-huh,” Blake murmured, and signed on an empty line which was prompting for her signature.

“I’m not the one who can make this call, but I think Dad would agree this is a good idea?”

Blake was too focused on filling out her contact information to acknowledge Ruby’s rhetorical question. She jotted down her Scroll number quickly, with half a thought to put down a fake one instead. She almost did it, as she weighed the pros and cons and found them to be equally viable; but she figured it would be better to not commit forgery on her second day in her new city. Perhaps after a week.

“What I’m trying to say is…come work for us!”

Blake’s pen swerved as she was signing another form, forming a thick mar which cut across her first name in a vicious curve. She glanced up, her head raising in interest, and was met with Ruby’s nervous grin as the girl watched her. Blake noticed she had some type of puzzle box in her hands, covered in multi-colored tiles which had no sense of relation to one another.

She eyed the other girl, and slowly put her pen down to rest on the papers in her lap.

“You don’t know me. You don’t even know my last name,” she said, perplexed. 

Ruby shrugged at that, her grin falling slightly.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “but you’re gonna have to look for a job eventually, right? And we’ve been needing someone here in the front office. So it works out! And...I can get to know you, that way.” 

Blake stared at her. 

Then she glanced to the papers in her lap.

Then, for a reason unknown to her, she thought back to the abandoned buildings framing the auto shop. And the lonely woman on the edge of the street, dipping her foot into the road. She thought about the flowers outside of the shop, and Taiyang’s laidback, welcoming aura. About Ruby’s stilted gestures and genuine trust in a person she’d just met. About Yang’s awkward attempt at an introduction.

“I’ll…I’ll think about it,” Blake acquiesced.

Ruby’s grin came back in full force, and she immediately darted out of the office chair that she had been lounging in previously. The girl moved _fast_ , Blake realized with a startle, clearing the space between them before she could register what was happening. Ruby grasped the pen in her hand, flipped her wrist up, and then wrote down a Scroll number across her bare skin.

“Call this number when you decide,” she said. “I’ll talk to my dad about it! I can tell he likes you. I’m sure he’d love to hire you!”

With that, the subject was dropped. Ruby returned to the desk, puzzle box in hand, and continued to click through it in peace. Blake focused her attention back on the forms, and they sat in amenable solitude until Taiyang returned to check on her progress; she handed him the finished paperwork. 

Ruby left the room shortly after, and she gave Blake plenty of meaningful stares as she tried to get her attention. Blake kept her eyes on Taiyang while he entered the necessary information into the computer, though she did spare Ruby a glance as the girl finally went to leave the office.

She left to return her rental car to the dealership she had gotten it from, just outside of the capital, as soon as Taiyang finalized the forms. She took a cab back into the city once that was finished, returning to Patchwork Auto, where her new car had been moved to the front parking lot sometime after she’d left. Neither of the sisters were in sight, but Taiyang came out to hand her the keys before the cab even left the driveway.

She wondered if he knew what his daughter had offered her. He made no indication of it, as he dropped the keys into her hand and wished her well. Though he did tell her to come back if she had any other questions, or if the car gave her any trouble.

She didn’t say anything in return, other than another, “Thank you,” directed from under her breath as she lowered herself into the driver’s seat. When she pulled out of Patchwork’s driveway, she kept her eyes on the road before her. A blue glow flickered out of the corner of her eye as she drove away.

True to Ruby’s word, the car didn’t seem to have any problems. Blake wound aimlessly throughout Mantle for the better part of the afternoon, learning its streets, staring out at the dilapidated buildings and feeling far more at home than she did in the Sanus District. She stopped at a nameless park for a time, and sat on the hood of her car as she stared out over the empty playground. 

As if prompted by her presence in the lonely park, a strong gust of wind stirred up. The swings on the swing-sets began to twist. Rusty chains creaked and squealed, loud enough for her to hear from across the distance.

She thought back to the offer that had been made to her, in Patchwork’s parking lot. 

_“Come work for us.”_

The girl’s voice, Ruby’s, sounded more hopeful in her memory than it should have been. 

Perhaps a tinge of that hope was her own. 

Blake tilted her head as she watched the swings settle back into stillness. The people there had been nice enough, if only slightly overbearing. And even though she didn’t know the first thing about being a mechanic…from what Ruby had described to her, that wasn’t what they would have her doing. 

And maybe…maybe she could learn the trade, eventually. It was work that would keep her mind off of other things. She could learn to enjoy it. If she learned how to get past the oil and the dirt, first.

She could picture days spent underneath the hood of a car. Perhaps hearing the sisters behind her, joking about some inside knowledge that she could be privy to. 

It was, perhaps, an option. Maybe a distant one, but it was there nonetheless. And wasn’t that the whole reason she’d come to Atlas City in the first place? For the freedom to choose what she wanted to do?

She called the number Ruby had written on her wrist later that evening, after she had driven to her heart's content, and returned to the empty parking spot across from her apartment. She sat in her new car, staring at her Scroll with the number punched into the screen in silence, before she pressed the call button. The girl herself answered, and immediately passed the Scroll away, her voice betraying how giddy she was. Blake could almost picture her jumping in place. 

“Hello?” Taiyang’s voice came through her Scroll.

Blake stared at the pale blue screen for a moment. “This is Blake. From this morning,” she said. She winced as she added that last addition. It wasn’t particularly helpful.

There was an unknown rustling coming through from the other side for a moment, as she waited for whether Taiyang would remember her or not.

“How can I help you, Blake?” he then asked. “I hope the new car isn’t giving you trouble already.”

Blake’s other hand was resting on the steering wheel. Absentmindedly, she patted it with her fingers. “No, it’s been good. Ruby told me it would run perfectly, and so far it has…thank you.”

She stayed quiet as she thought on what she would say next.

“No need to keep thanking me. All I did was sell it to you. But…I take it you’re not calling about the car, are you?”

So Ruby _had_ talked to him about it. Blake looked out of her window, staring up into the bedroom window of her apartment.

“I don’t want to make any assumptions,” she began carefully, “but if you’re looking for a temporary worker, I’m in need of a job.”

The line was silent for a few moments, and Blake kept her eyes on her apartment as she waited for a response. It was as dim as it had been when she’d left. The darkened windows reminded her, rather unpleasantly, of the abandoned house from her childhood. She looked away; just as she’d always done, when confronted with discomfort.

Finally, she heard a voice coming through the Scroll. It sounded distant, and high-pitched, a whisper even to her ears. Taiyang responded just as quietly, too low for her to make out the words.

Then more rustling sounded. She brought the Scroll closer to her face, and stared, fixated, at the screen. 

“Can you be at the office at 9:30 tomorrow morning?” Taiyang asked. 

Unbeknownst to her, a smile grew across her face. 

“Yeah,” she replied. “I can.”

..:|:..

Blake barely noticed when she stopped paying attention to the days flowing by. She was settling into a routine; waking up early in the dawn, brewing her morning tea before sitting cross-legged on her back patio to take careful sips from a steaming cup, with her ears free from her ribbon’s constraint. By the time she finished, the sun would be just beginning to peek over the horizon, and burn away the night sky above her. Then, she would get ready for a day at Patchwork. 

Just as Ruby had originally described, Taiyang had her going through the shop’s mess of an office to sort through the countless files, records, and notes that were piled throughout the room. The cacophony even cascaded to the rest of the office building, like the break room and the manager’s office, which she hadn’t seen on her first visit there.

Occasionally, she would venture into the garage, and watched as the mechanics bustled about. Yang was often at the forefront of the team, always throwing herself into problems that the others didn’t want to deal with. Blake was learning quite quickly that the girl would continue to work, with plenty of curses thrown into the air, on an issue until it didn’t exist anymore, possessed by a stubbornness that was unparalleled. 

Taiyang wasn’t above getting his hands dirty either, to her surprise. He was often covered in as much oil as Yang was by the end of the day, which gave Blake another purpose; namely, following him around every corner of the property to make sure she wrote down anything he needed to be made note of. 

Before she knew what had happened, two weeks had come and gone. 

She was stood in the entryway of the apartment, with a clean white envelope in her hand, when she was finally struck with the realization. The paper was being slowly marred by the thin layer of grime that coated her fingertips— an unavoidable reality of working at an auto shop. It was her first paycheck, she realized belatedly.

She released a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding; her shoulders sagged without the air in her lungs to hold them up. 

It was a momentous occasion, to her. But she couldn’t have felt more exhausted once she realized that she had been successfully living on her own, and truly _living_ , rather than just surviving, for half a month. Had it truly been such a short amount of time? She felt like it had been a lifetime since she had driven into Atlas City for the first time. In under a month she had found a place that, if she couldn’t it call _home_ , she could at least claim as a permanent residence. She had a job. She was even gradually getting to know her coworkers. Her _coworkers_. That would have been a foreign concept to her, not even a year ago.

She wasn’t stuck in a cycle of running, anymore. And that, more than anything, was what threw her off guard.

She kicked her shoes off, having had enough of standing in her hallway, and went to put her paycheck on the counter lining the staircase. It was settled amongst the potted plants which were piled along the wall, the only spots of color in the otherwise monochromatic living space.

Her stomach growled as she passed the refrigerator, though she ignored its complaints for the time being. The desire to get the oil off of her skin before it became a permanent fixture of her fingertips outweighed hunger in that moment, and she went to the bathroom with no more thought given to dinner.

The lights fixed above the mirror, so close to the low ceiling that their tops brushing against it, hummed as she flicked them on. The fixtures illuminated the bathroom in a weak glow. She began to run her shower, and as she waited for the water to warm, she untied the bow restraining her ears. They flicked numerous times once they were free, and she shook her head to alleviate the tension that had built at the base of them over the course of the day. 

That was just one of the many secrets that she couldn’t give up, no matter how many times Ruby asked her why she always wore the bow in her hair. Blake looked at her reflection in the mirror, taking in the sight of her unbound ears. The ears which marked her as _other_. As Faunus.

Blake shook her head again, this time to dispel the unpleasant topic, and proceeded with getting into the shower without any more thought.

Well over half an hour later, she sighed as she wrapped a towel around her torso, stepping out of the steaming shower. She reached for her hairbrush, balanced precariously on the sink’s edge, and brushed it through the damp strands as she went to leave the bathroom. There was no point in putting her clothes in the bathroom; they would just get damp in the small space. She hoped she had done her laundry. Her days were blurring together, and she couldn’t remember if that were the case.

When she opened the bathroom door, she was tugging the hairbrush through a particularly stubborn tangle of hair. Her head was tilted downward, absently tracing the tiles at her feet as she stepped across the threshold. Her eyes trailed forward— and were met with a pair of legs stood directly across from the doorway.

She looked up, startled, and stared into eyes wide enough to match her own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter really got away from me. My apologies for the lack of Sun; but don't worry, he'll be making himself known soon enough.


	2. Chapter 2

The distinct _thud_ of Blake’s hairbrush hitting the wall was the only sound which echoed in the deafening silence of the apartment. She backpedaled rapidly through the threshold of the bathroom door, one hand clenched tight over her towel while the other shot out, slamming the door with a force which caused the walls to shake.

Her mind raced to come to some sort of logical conclusion for the intruder. There was no explanation for why someone would be standing in her apartment— save one. 

Her blood froze in her veins, as she stared at the bathroom door. 

Had the Fang truly caught up to her so quickly, she wondered? It didn’t seem possible. She hadn’t caught sight of any of the organization’s sympathizers, in all the months she’d been traveling. She would have noticed if she were being watched long before she’d come to the decision to stay in one place. After so long without them hounding at her heels, she had hoped that he— that they had given up on tracking her down. So, was it just blind luck? And if so, would they have been so eager to catch her that they would break into her apartment with so little time to prepare?

_Where’s my Scroll,_ Blake thought frantically. A quick scan through the small room showed no sign of the damned device. The hope of calling for help, before the intruder broke into the bathroom, evaporated before her eyes like the steam fogging the mirror. Though she wasn’t entirely sure _who_ she would call, anyways.

Realization dawned on her, then, that she very well might need to fight the intruder while clothed in nothing but a bath towel. She reached into the shower, and yanked a nearly-full bottle of shampoo off the shelf. It was a pitiful weapon. But she hoped it would grant her enough time to could club them over the head with it, and then run.

“Um…hey?”

Blake blinked in surprise at the timid greeting which sounded from the other side of the door. What were they thinking? They spoke in an embarrassed tone, like they weren’t sure they’d shown up at the right address. 

Did they get lost and somehow end up outside her bathroom door? She tightened her grip on the shampoo bottle, and shuffled forward.

“I’m armed,” she called back, and then scowled. Stars, she sounded ridiculous. “And I’m calling the police!”

_Way to make it worse,_ she chastised mentally. Her hand twitched, as she anticipated what would happen next. There was a stretch of silence, in which Blake took the time to try and calm her frantic heartbeat. In the quiet, her ears strained to hear for any movement outside of the bathroom. She held her breath.

Then, the intruder spoke. “Your Scroll is on the counter out here. Do you keep another one in the bathroom?” their voice carried a trace of dry amusement, and Blake cursed silently.

“Please come out. I promise I can’t hurt you. Trust me, I’m just as surprised as you are.” 

The person’s voice was pitiful, verging into the realm of pleading with her. Blake lowered her bottle slightly, and shifted out of the defensive posture she’d assumed.

“What do you mean, ‘can’t hurt me’?” she asked. She leaned closer to the door as she spoke.

“Come out and I’ll show you.”

Blake scoffed. As if she’d fall for that.

Almost as though they could hear her thoughts, she heard them sigh.

“I know it seems like a trap,” they said, their voice muffled through the thin layer of the door, “all I can do is tell you the truth. I can’t—” they cut themselves off, and Blake’s eyes narrowed at the misstep. “—I _won’t_ hurt you. I promise. I haven’t come in there yet, have I?”

Blake stood frozen, undecided, and silently weighed her options. 

On the one hand, she’d have to leave the bathroom eventually. There weren’t any windows, the door being her only exit. Her only option was to place her trust on this person’s word alone; but they were in her apartment, unwarranted, and could easily be lying about not hurting her. It had happened plenty of times before.

She drew in a breath, urged her heart to slow in its frantic racing, and placed her hand on the door handle. She thought a silent prayer that the person wouldn’t have a gun trained on her face as soon as she opened the door. Any sort of melee combat she could handle; growing up in the ranks of the Fang saw to that. But even she wouldn’t be able to dodge a bullet at point-blank range.

Her hand pressed down on the handle, unlatching it with a soft click. She barely needed to push it forward for it to swing on its hinges. She leaned forward, positioning herself to glance through the opening.

Upon cracking the door ajar enough to peer into the hallway, Blake was met with a blank wall. She then glanced towards the floor, searching for the intruder.

The sight of a man crouched before the doorway, his arms dangling between his legs, greeted her. 

A white sweater swathed his broad frame, and a quick glance downward afforded a glimpse of his folded legs sheathed in black sweatpants, with two white stripes embroidered down the outside of each leg, while his feet remained bare.

Her attention then roamed up, passing over a tanned face, decorated with a hint of freckles on his checks and scattered around his nose. Her gaze trailed further to his eyes, where a deep, rich gray bore into her own, peering up at her from under the full eyebrows which curved over them. Light blond hair draped down to brush his ears. When she noticed his jaw clench, her eyes were drawn to the movement; and subsequently, to the full pair of pale lips which frowned at her scrutiny. With a jolt, she returned her focus to his eyes. 

She stared him down in silence, unsure of what to do about the situation, when a flicker of movement at his back caught her attention.

To her surprise, the length of a thin, tawny tail curled itself across the man’s lap.

_Faunus_ , her mind supplied, albeit a tad late.

The man watched her warily, as she evaluated him. He didn’t attempt to rise to his feet. He didn’t speak. She pushed the door further, and moved to stand in the threshold between the bathroom and the hallway to get a better look at him. He seemed curled into himself— like he was trying to appear as unthreatening as he could.

Despite the situation, his demeanor was amusing to Blake. He had, after all, appeared in her apartment, not the other way around. But her grasp on the bottle loosened by a small degree when she noticed that his hands hung as loosely as his tail, devoid of anything that could constitute a weapon.

Neither of them spoke. Blake didn’t want to be the first to; she wanted to hear answers. She held his gaze firmly, refusing to be lulled into a false sense of security. To his credit, the man didn’t flinch away. 

A trickle of water snaked its way down the back of her neck. She twitched against the sensation. Her eyes flicked away from his. 

And then she noticed the glow.

It was almost imperceptible. A light cerulean tinge which could have been excused as a trick of the eye in the low light of the hallway— but only if she weren’t Faunus herself. Only if she weren’t capable of seeing in the dark.

Blake sucked in a harsh breath. She blinked— hoping she had just imagined the haze.

But as she continued to look at him, it didn’t fade. The man’s image was fuzzy, this close to her. Like the edges of him were blurred into the wall behind his back.

_How?_

She had been alone in the apartment for two weeks. 

There had been no indication of anyone other than herself there. No movement out of the corner of her eye. No calls for attention behind her back for her ears to swivel towards. No shadows following her as she went about her days. Two weeks she had fully believed she was safe, believed her apartment to be a respite from the shadows she saw every day outside her front door. _She had been alone_. But the proof was inescapable; the image of the man before her— though he appeared to be solid— was slightly faded, his skin incandescent. 

Blake screamed. “ _Get out!_ ”

Her throat stung. She hadn’t spoken so loud in months. Her voice reverberated within her chest. After so long, she didn’t even know she was capable of such a sound.

The man didn’t seem to expect her reaction. He startled, leaping to his feet— and jumped so high that he hovered in the air before her, the top of his head just barely brushing the ceiling. Blake flinched backwards at the sudden movement.

“Woah,” he said, and held his hands out towards her. His palms raised upward. Placating. “Hey, hold on—”

Blake shook her head. She couldn’t do this— she couldn’t _do_ this. _Not again_.

“Get out,” she repeated, her voice hoarse and high. She shut her eyes as she yelled.

It was the first time in four years she was addressing a ghost.

She stood in silence, dripping water onto the tiled floor, shivering and clutching her towel. Her ears were perked so high they strained. She heard every droplet of water, falling off the ends of her hair, falling to form puddles at her feet. She heard her own breathing, labored within her heaving chest. She didn’t hear the man’s voice again.

She didn’t dare to look until the weight of a stare on her skin finally began to dissipate. 

When she did finally crack open her eyes, the man was gone. She glanced towards the front door, and the mirror which hung beside it, and saw nothing other than her own reflection, hunched over and miserable even to her own eyes.

Then she rushed towards her bedroom, trailing water behind her in her haste.

There was no sign of the spirit as she collected the first articles of clothing she could reach; though she didn’t give her surroundings too much attention, more focused on moving as quickly as she could manage while keeping her towel secured. She ran down the stairs once she had what she needed, and collected her Scroll off of the counter— _Just where he said it was_ , her mind supplied fearfully— before returning to the bathroom. She locked the door behind her.

She got dressed in a frantic, mad dash, flailing to get her clothes on. She almost neglected to wrap her ears in the ribbon dangling off the sink’s edge. When she remembered to do so, she jerkily wiped the mirror clean of steam and, with shaking fingers, tied the bow atop her head. It was lop-sided once she finished, likely leaving her ears prone to observation from the right angle.

Blake didn’t care. She pocketed her Scroll, flung the bathroom door open, and immediately shoved her feet into her shoes. She pulled her keys off of their hook, hung beside the front door.

“Hold on!” a voice called out.

Blake froze. The keyring dangled precariously from her still fingers, as she stared vacantly at the wall in front of her.

She didn’t turn. 

She could sense a presence hovering beside her. It was close; if she turned her head, she expected she would find a face mere inches away from hers, with wide gray eyes attempting to plead with her. She didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to know what was there, watching her. She wanted to _leave_. To run and never come back.

Her fingers twitched. The keys nearly fell off of them.

It was force of habit, a reflex, to ignore the presence of a spirit. She’d perfected the skill over her twenty three years of life. It was necessary; the dead were more trouble than they were worth. Always desperate for anyone to recognize them. To talk to them. And Blake was someone who could do so. They latched on to that. They _needed_ her. They always needed her, as much as she needed to be free of them, and the curse she’d been born with which allowed her to see them.

Her hand reached for the door handle. Her head lowered to stare at her feet.

“No, wait! Just listen to me!”

She flinched as he spoke. She didn’t turn around.

She couldn’t bring herself to press on the handle, to open the door. Why couldn’t she do it? Her fingers tightened on the cold metal; all she needed to do was pull, and she would be outside. Away from one of her worst nightmares. And yet she couldn’t do it. She was frozen to the floor, inanimate, carved out of stone. 

It was a childish notion; if she didn’t move, the spirit couldn’t see her. A ridiculous belief.

That presence hovered close against her back. It was like an electric surge, stinging her through her clothes. 

“Look, I can explain, just…please don’t go.”

**_“Don’t go…”_**

Blake yanked on the handle. She flung the door inward, and was across the threshold in a flash. She shut the door just as quickly, and shakily turned to jam her apartment key into the lock. Once she was relatively sure the lock had turned, she sprinted across the road without care for oncoming traffic. Several horns blared at her as she crossed the lanes.

She got into her car without looking up. The engine sputtered as she coaxed it to start, and she swerved onto the road once she was able to get the car moving. More horns sounded as she cut into traffic. She buckled herself in as she drove, her eyes locked on the reflection of her apartment in her rearview mirror until it vanished into the distance.

..:|:..

It wasn’t until she was several blocks away that she realized she didn’t know where she was going.

She glanced around her surroundings once she came to her senses, and then looked at the dashboard. Almost an hour had passed since she’d fled the apartment…and she didn’t remember any of it. 

She frowned, and then began slowing to a crawl on the side of the road. She had no idea where she was; the skyscrapers were unfamiliar, the business signs foreign to her.

She pulled into an empty complex. A dentist’s office, she surmised, from the sight of the tooth-shaped sign placed between the road and the sidewalk. Once she came to a stop, parked haphazardly across a couple of empty spaces, she finally released her death grip on the steering wheel. Her joints whined as they loosened, and she cut off the engine with a jerk of the key. She then massaged the base of her palm as she stared out of the windshield.

What was she going to do?

She tugged on her fingers as she watched the traffic in front of her, flowing by sluggishly in the purple light of the evening hour.

Perhaps she could go to a motel for a few days. She probably had the funds for it, though she didn’t exactly relish the idea. Her account was already running extremely low, due to the combination of the down-payments for her apartment and car, and her splurging on the furniture she’d gotten. She also admitted, with a scowl, that after two weeks of living in a space of her own, she was already growing spoiled to the concept of a permanent residence. 

Next, she figured she could just stay in her car; maybe she could go set up in Patchwork’s parking lot, and sleep in the back seat. She usually arrived before anyone else anyways, so it wouldn’t be suspicious if she were there in the mornings. If she drove off in the evenings and circled back to the shop once she knew everyone was gone, no-one would suspect a thing. She’d lived out of cars before, when she first went on the run. It was uncomfortable, but far preferable to the next option of nothing at all. 

But there was also the matter of her belongings, and her paycheck which needed to be deposited. She sighed when she thought of that envelope, sitting innocently beside her plants. 

She knew she would have to go back to the apartment eventually. Her lease was good through the next year, too. The last thing she wanted to do was be hemorrhaging lien for an apartment she wasn’t going to be living in. Her frown deepened as she continued to stare at the cars passing by. She hoped that, over the course of the next few days, she could find a loophole out of it, or come up with some asinine, yet acceptable excuse to back out early.

But that would have to wait. Right now, she needed a place to stay which wasn’t her car or her apartment.

As she plotted, she happened to glance down towards the dashboard, where her Scroll sat propped up within the cupholder by her thigh. And an idea occurred to her.

Was she willing to impose on people she’d only known for less than a month, she wondered? She stared at the innocent device, with its cracked frame and its contact list filled with only three names. 

It wasn’t until she had pulled up one of those three numbers she’d saved in her contacts that she had her answer; the one Ruby had written onto her wrist, not long ago.

She stared at the series of numbers, with her thumb hovering between the button to close the phone, as well as the call button, as it blinked slowly at her. Beckoning her to press it. 

She pressed her lips together as she warred with herself over whether to do so or not. 

She hated being driven out of her home by the paranormal. She hated feeling the need to rely on others. But she also didn’t want to stay in her car. She didn’t even want to stay in a hotel. 

In a way, she’d already gotten used to relying on outsiders. _Weak_ , a voice repeated, endlessly, at the back of her mind. 

She made her choice when her thumb finally settled on the pulsing icon.

The ringing coming through the Scroll was much louder than Blake expected it to be; though her ears _were_ pointed high on her skull.

Then it cut off. Silence. A click sounded shortly after.

“Hi, Blake!” Ruby’s voice rose up through the receiver, and Blake’s shoulders shuddered as she released her breath.

“Hey,” she greeted back. She held the Scroll close to her face, but she wasn’t sure if she’d spoken loud enough for Ruby to hear her. Her throat didn’t feel capable of producing a sound louder than a whisper. 

Ruby didn’t seem to notice something was wrong with her voice; Blake could hear her in the background, along with the clatter of ceramic. She wondered if she was getting ready for dinner with her family, and a twinge flared in her chest at the thought. 

“So…not that I’m not glad that you called— because I am— but what’s up?” Ruby asked, after another bout of noise settled down.

“I…” she paused, wondering how best to word what she was going to ask. She looked out the windshield again, allowing her eyes to unfocus as she stared out at traffic.

“I don’t want to impose…but I was hoping you might let me stay at your place for a bit.”

Ruby said nothing. 

Blake’s fingers twitched as they curled around the steering wheel. The hand holding her Scroll remained loose; but her grip on the wheel tightened as she waited for what Ruby would say next.

The longer she waited, the more she was sure it was a mistake, having asked such a thing. She had only known the girl and her family for two weeks. She had only ever seen them at work, where Blake maintained an amicable but distant relationship with the three of them. Surely she was stepping out of the boundaries she herself had put down by asking this.

“Okay, uh, sorry for leaving!” Ruby sounded rushed, speaking quickly as she apologized. “I went to go ask Dad what he thought.”

Blake breathed out a small sigh, and lowered her head. She braced to hear the inevitable refusal.

“He said sure! But we wanna make sure you’re okay, first! Is something wrong?”

Blake breathed out a sigh. Her fingers loosened, ever so slightly, from around the steering wheel.

“There’s…” She paused, not entirely sure where she was going with this. “…a roach infestation at my apartment, that I just found. It’s going to take a couple days to get an exterminator.”

Well, there was certainly an infestation of _something_ , she thought. But there were no exterminators for ghosts, as she had come to learn over the years.

Ruby seemed to accept that as a good enough answer. “Ah! Okay. Well if that’s the case, Dad said you can come by whenever you’re ready! We’re just getting dinner now. Do you want anything? We’re having pizza.”

Blake didn’t want to impose on them any further than she already was, even as her stomach growled at the thought of copious amounts of cheese and bread. “I’m okay, but thank you,” she said. “I can come after you’ve had dinner.”

“Nah, you can come by now! It’s alright,” Ruby replied. “I’ll send you the address. See ya in a bit!”

She didn’t seem like she would take no for an answer, Blake thought.

“…Alright. I’ll be there soon.”

And then the call dropped. 

Blake stared at the darkened screen of her Scroll until it lit up, only a couple minutes after Ruby had ended the call, with a message from her containing her family’s address. She stared at it until the screen once again dimmed, and she could only see through the glass.

She thought about the man in her apartment, as she looked at her lap. She wondered what he would be doing, in that dark and empty place.

It didn’t truly matter. Spirits couldn’t affect the living world, she had come to learn. They could only interact with someone unfortunate enough to be capable of hearing them…and she had only ever known herself to be someone capable of such a thing. 

But she couldn’t help the curiosity which took over as she opened Ruby’s message, and set directions in her Scroll for the address. 

What would she do, if she were given eternity in a single space and being unable to do anything with it?

Her engine sputtered to life as she twisted the key in the ignition, and she cast the thought off as she pulled out of the parking lot. It would do her no good to ponder on something like that. It had never done so in the past.

..:|:..

As it turned out, Taiyang and his daughters lived not in Atlas City or in Mantle as Blake had originally suspected, but in the small suburban town that she had briefly considered and subsequently tossed aside in the real estate office, two weeks ago.

The town of Patch was a humble place. The main road only had two stoplights from what Blake could tell, the old iron-and-wire models that she was familiar with, and was lined with brick buildings on either side of the street as she wound her way through town. Small side roads branched off at rare intersections, and when her Scroll directed her to turn down such a road, she was met with rows of one-story bungalows pressed close to each other. Their front lawns were patches of grass, much like what she had grown up with, though they were verdant and maintained well enough.

She drove slowly, trying to guess which house belonged to her coworkers. The sky had darkened considerably since she had left the city, fading from violet to indigo as she put the blue glow of Atlas behind her. In comparison to the cool light there, the windows in many of the houses here glowed in soft gold and orange, their light spilling out onto their front porches and yards in soft patches.

Once she was halfway down the street, her Scroll informed her that she had reached her destination. She stopped, and looked at the screen. The house, apparently, was on her right. She looked out of the passenger side window at the closest one.

It looked much the same as its neighbors. A one-story house, with its roof extending over a small porch on the left-hand side. A portion of the house extended further forward, boxing the porch in with a wall that had the front door set within it. The panelling was painted a soft yellow, a few shades lighter than Patchwork’s own office, while the expansive windows which looked out over the porch and the front lawn were bordered with white. A hanging basket dangled from the lip of the roof, just over the stone staircase leading to the porch, and a green bush filled it, scattered through with white flowers.

Through the window which faced the porch, Blake could see figures moving about in what she guessed to be the dining room. She caught sight of a tall, blond man as she continued to stare, and finally realized she was at the right place.

She pulled her car into their driveway, which led up to a closed wooden gate. She cut off the ignition, and then steadied herself with a soft sigh. 

_It’s just for a day or two,_ she thought to herself. _Just until I can find a way out of the lease._

Before she got out of her car, she made sure to inspect her bow in the rearview mirror as best as she could. She had been correct earlier, in assuming her ears would be visible underneath the ribbon, and she adjusted it as best she could without removing it entirely to start over. She wouldn’t risk exposing them, even in the safety of her car with no-one else around to see.

Once she was satisfied with the resulting bow, she exited the car, and made her way down the driveway towards the path which led to the front porch. She kept her steps light as she ascended the stairs, and through the window she could clearly see Taiyang, Ruby, and Yang sitting at a round dining table; Taiyang’s back was turned to the window, while the sisters sat on either side of him, seemingly engrossed in conversation, as evidenced by Ruby’s wild gestures and the way Yang leaned back in her seat, laughing.

Blake watched them for a moment. They seemed so at ease. So warm. It was a stark contrast to the chill she felt on her skin in that moment. To the shadows she’d felt cast throughout her apartment as she had rushed to leave that place, only hours earlier. 

She wasn’t sure if the pang in her chest was envy, or something else, as she watched the family through the window. 

It didn’t matter, she told herself. She turned to the front door, and despite knowing they could easily see her through the glass at her side, she knocked on the white-stained wood, before taking a step back.

Three heads swiveled to look at her, and three identical smiles grew as the sisters and their father recognized her. Taiyang rose out of his seat and gestured for his daughters to stay at the table, even as Ruby looked ready to sprint to the front door herself. Then he left the room, and a moment later she heard a lock unlatch in the front door.

When the door opened and revealed Taiyang, Blake’s first thought was that he didn’t seem all that different at home as opposed to Patchwork. While he’d changed out of the stained jumpsuit that she usually saw him in at work, and was wearing a beige sweater and jeans in its place, he seemed to be just as relaxed here as he was at work. If not more-so.

“Come on in,” he said to her, and then waved her forward as he stepped aside to let her pass. She followed his instruction, and once she was inside, he shut the door behind her.

They stood in what appeared to be the living room, with the walls painted a deep golden color and accentuated with a dark brown couch centered before a table, pressed into the nook that contained the second window which faced the front yard. A black projector was situated on the table, though at the moment it was dormant. Along the far wall, various picture frames of various shapes and sizes were hung in sporadic order. At her feet, an ornately patterned rug was spread out over the mahogany floorboards, deep green with cream leaves weaving throughout the fabric.

“You find the place okay?” Taiyang asked her, as she studied the room before her. She turned to face him, and then nodded.

He then pointed towards a tray by the front door, which was nearly filled to overflowing with pairs of shoes. “You can just throw your boots there.”

She did as he instructed, and gave him her coat when he offered to take it from her. Once he hung it atop a stack of similar outerwear which were piled precariously on a hook above the shoe tray, he led her to the dining room. The walls there were paneled in white at the base, and above that were painted a light, airy gray. The round dining table was situated beneath a low hanging light fixture, which shone brilliantly over the flower vase at the center of the table.

The sisters were still sitting at the table when she entered, and Ruby waved eagerly at her once she came into view. Yang twisted in her chair, and tapped her index and middle fingers to her forehead in a salute. 

Taiyang passed by her as she nodded to the sisters in her own greeting, and returned to his place at the table. Blake stood in the archway as she took in the people before her, unsure of what to do from there. She crossed her arms as she debated what she should say.

Ruby caught on to her uncertainty quickly, and pointed at the empty chair between her and her sister. “You can sit here!” she said. 

Blake glanced towards the seat in question. An empty paper plate and a glass of water were set out before it.  


It was almost as if they had been expecting her to arrive when she did. She looked back towards Ruby, and then went over to take the offered seat. As she went, Yang left the table, and moved to go behind Blake.

She didn’t pay attention to where the blonde girl went, and settled into the chair a moment after. 

Taiyang had gone back to his dinner after he had sat down, and Ruby similarly nibbled on a pizza crust. Blake sat with her hands in her lap, and fought with her ears to keep them still as they tried to swivel, tamping down her curiosity at the unknown surroundings.

She looked at the vase in front of her, hoping to distract herself. Multiple green tendrils flowed out of the crystal container, and bursts of tall white flowers, blooming in wide petals, rose out from the clear water. As she tried to guess at their breed, Ruby seemed to take notice of her careful observation.

“Those are peonies,” she explained. Blake twitched, and her eyes darted to meet Ruby’s. She smiled. “I just cut them yesterday. We had some overflow at the shop.”

Blake didn’t know what that meant. Patchwork didn’t have their own flowers.

Taiyang caught on to her confusion. He cleared his throat, and Blake looked to him as he began to speak. “Ruby works at a flower shop in Mantle,” he explained.

That wasn’t what Blake expected to hear. She glanced back to Ruby, who was nodding along to her father’s explanation. “But you’re at Patchwork every day,” she said, confused.

“I…kind of make my own schedule,” Ruby answered. “It’s mainly me and the owner right now, though we’ll sometimes get temporary help. So I’ll go in whenever she’s not around, and when I’m not there I’ll help out at Patchwork.” 

Blake accepted that as a good enough answer. She wondered if that flower shop was the reason Patchwork’s front lot looked like a miniature garden, with its numerous planter boxes and hanging baskets always filled with fresh flowers.

A moment later, a cardboard box was shoved into her line of sight. She startled— but then her stomach growled at the warm smell which wafted from the few slices of pizza which greeted her eyes.

Her eyes followed the arm which held the box towards her, and she finally registered Yang when the girl nodded towards the pizza. “We weren’t sure what toppings you liked, so we just got plain cheese. I’ll have whatever you don’t take, so you better choose something soon,” she warned.

Blake looked back towards the pizza. “Um…it’s okay, I’m really not hungry,” she said. She really didn’t want to take any more generosity from them than what they had already offered her.

But then her stomach growled again, and much louder this time. Loud enough for human ears to hear, judging by the way Ruby and Yang looked at each other. Yang waved the box in front of her.

“Take a slice,” she insisted, “or two. But leave some for me!”

“For _us_ ,” Taiyang corrected, as he held out his empty plate to his daughter. Yang groaned.

Blake figured she wouldn’t win this argument, so she reached out and took a still warm slice from the box, and put it on her plate. At her side, Ruby passed her a small stack of napkins, while Yang went over to her father and offered the box to him. Once he had taken the two slices he had chosen, Yang put two of her own on her plate, and then went to put the box back wherever she’d gotten it from.

She had just taken her first bite when Taiyang addressed her. “So, Ruby said you’ve got a bug problem at your place?” he asked her.

She chewed as she thought of how best to answer. 

“Yeah,” she said once she’d swallowed, “I…found some roaches in my kitchen when I got home.”

She thought of gray eyes staring up at her from the floor.

Taiyang hummed. “I know of a couple places if you haven’t found an exterminator yet,” he offered. 

Yang returned to her seat, and promptly set to eating her pizza as fast as she was physically capable. Blake fiddled with the slice in her hands.

“That would be helpful, thank you,” she murmured. She took another bite to keep herself from frowning. The people Taiyang knew wouldn’t be able to get rid of the unwanted resident she had, after all.

Then she looked up. 

“Are you sure it’s okay if I stay here for the night?” she asked. Yang glanced at her as she spoke, her cheeks bulging with her food, while Ruby and Taiyang looked at each other.

“Of course,” Taiyang said after a moment, and then looked at her. “It’s not a problem.”

“You can stay in my room,” Ruby offered, “I’ll steal Yang’s bed.”

“Hey! When did I agree to that?”

“You didn’t! But you’re gonna!”

Blake’s eyes darted between the sisters as they bickered, and she quietly nibbled on her pizza and sipped her water, finishing them both before the girls had settled their heated debate of who would get the coveted bed for the night.

Taiyang seemed more amused than annoyed at his daughters’ behavior and, once he had finished his meal, finally interceded to tell them to clean up their dinner. Blake stood to take care of her own glass and plate, but Yang picked them up from the table before she had a chance to. She opened her mouth to insist that she could do it, but the blonde was out of the room before she could speak, disappearing through an archway which she assumed led to the kitchen. Ruby followed close behind her.

She sat back down, sullen, and waited to be told what to do next. Taiyang left after a moment with his own glass and plate, and she pulled her Scroll out of her pocket to swipe her thumb aimlessly across the cracked screen. 

She wondered if her landlord would buy the roach infestation excuse. The woman didn’t seem overly interested in the workings of the apartment, after all. There was a possibility she could get by with claiming she hired an exterminator to get rid of them before she had a chance to inspect the place. But would that be enough to get out of a lease? She frowned down at the dark glass in her hand. She wasn’t entirely sure.

Then her thoughts wandered back towards the source of her current predicament. The spirit.

How long had he been there, she wondered? How had she never noticed a ghost was nearby? Most sought the company of any living creature, not caring that they couldn’t see the dead in the first place. But this one…there were scarcely few explanations that made sense. The first, she thought, was that he was recently deceased. But surely she would have heard of a death in one of the nearby complexes, right? She didn’t think she would miss that sort of news. 

The second, which slightly chilled her blood, was that he had hidden from her. That he had watched her go about her day-to-day activities with an intimate viewpoint she would never afford to anyone in the living world. Her fingers tightened around her Scroll as she mulled over that possibility. 

But if that were the case…she had never encountered a spirit who went out of their way to hide from her. Most would try to speak with her, before realizing their efforts would be futile, and resigned themselves instead to again watching the world pass them by from afar. Her memory flashed back to the lonely motel that she had stayed in as she looked for places to live.

Some spirits, like the old man who had stared at the empty sky, seemed to simply…give up. Like the shade of the woman who still hovered on the edge of the street, in front of the abandoned building next to Patchwork, dipping her bare foot over the edge of the curb towards the pavement, before retracting it, in an endless cycle. They weren’t restless. They weren’t desperate. They weren’t anything; only empty shells. 

But none had ever tried to conceal themselves, she thought. 

And he had sounded so _normal_. He hadn’t reacted at all to her ability to see him. He had teased her as if he were an old friend.

Even when he had begged her to stay, he had sounded subdued, as if he already knew what she was going to do. He didn’t even try to stop her. Though she didn’t consider that to be of much importance, in truth, when he couldn’t have done anything to prevent her from fleeing.

Regardless of how he’d come to be in her apartment, she wondered how long he had been there. Had it been since before she had moved in? She frowned down at her Scroll at that thought— 

“Hey, Blake?”

She turned in her seat once she registered her name being called, and stuffed her Scroll back into her pocket.

Ruby stood in the archway behind her, leaning against one of its sides with her arms crossed. “C’mon, I’ll show you where the bathroom and my room are.”

She rose carefully out of her chair, making an effort to not drag its legs over the wooden floor, before she went to follow Ruby.

They passed through the kitchen, a tiny room with white cabinets and dark countertops, with the walls painted in a light cream. Taiyang stood before them, engrossed in washing the bowl in his hands in the sink. Blake turned her head away from observing him, and followed Ruby through another archway set at the end of the wall to their right. They stood in a narrow hallway, lined with five doors.

“This is Yang’s room,” Ruby explained, and gestured to a closed door which faced the kitchen. They moved left, towards three more. 

“And this is my room…well, its yours for tonight!” She tapped on the door on their left, and then moved to open the door across the hallway. “And this is the bathroom.”

She reached over to open that door, and Blake caught a glimpse of pale green walls in the gloom.

And then she realized she didn’t bring anything for her to use for the night.

When she informed Ruby of this, the girl shrugged. 

“We usually have a few new toothbrushes laying around,” she said, “and you can just borrow clothes from me or Yang.”

Then she returned her attention to her own bedroom, opening the door and gesturing for Blake to follow her inside.

When Blake entered, Ruby flicked on the ceiling light. Blake didn’t need it, but she wasn’t about to make that information known to Ruby.

It was a tiny bedroom, with just enough space to fit a double bed in the corner to their left, a nightstand beside it, and a closet which was on their right. A dark, narrow dresser was shoved into the corner beside the closet, and was piled high with all manner of trinkets and shiny curiosities. The walls were painted a deep maroon, and a cream-colored rug was spread out over the center of the wooden floor, though it was more than partially obscured by piles of gray and red clothing. The bed and the pillows were covered in deep black sheets, and both had small red flowers embroidered over their dark surfaces.

Blake looked to Ruby as she spread her arms wide, standing in the middle of the room. “And here we are!” Her leg brushed against one of the piles, and she kicked it underneath the bed frame as best she could while grinning nonchalantly. 

Blake glanced around the space again. “It’s…nice,” she offered. 

Ruby accepted that gleefully, and threw herself onto her mattress. Blake stood in the entryway, unsure of what to do from there.

I can get you some pajamas if you’d like,” Ruby said then, as she stared up at the ceiling. Blake turned her head to look at her, just as the girl frowned. “Though now that I think of it, my clothes probably won’t fit you.” She turned onto her side to face Blake, and scrutinized her. 

Then she smiled, and a glint appeared in her strange silver eyes. “Guess we’ll just have to steal Yang’s!”

She stood from her bed, then, and moved towards the doorway. 

“You can stay here, I’m gonna go get some from her room,” she explained, and pushed past Blake before she had a chance to articulate the fact that she felt bad about “stealing” anyone’s clothing.

For want of anything else to do, Blake moved further into the bedroom, and settled on the edge of the bed as she waited for Ruby to return.

She glanced around aimlessly, while she finally allowed her ears to twitch beneath her bow, with no-one else around to observe the movement. She studied the cacophony on the dresser’s surface with great interest, trying to discern what the purpose was of every manner of gear, wire, and other metallic oddities which were stored there. 

In the hallway, she heard voices erupt. One sounded like Ruby, insisting on something.

“You could’ve knocked, you know!” A voice which sounded like Yang’s shot back.

More words were exchanged in quick succession. Blake’s ears swiveled to follow them for a moment, before she lost interest in what was taking place outside of the room.

When she turned to focus on the nightstand on her left, a picture frame caught her eye. She turned further towards it, curiosity getting the better of her.

The picture was taken outdoors, atop a rolling green hill, and backdropped against a clear cerulean sky. The people in it didn’t seem aware they were being photographed; they were sat in the grass, smiling at one another, their laughter caught eternally in the paper. 

A woman with dark hair was holding a toddler in her arms, their head adorned with a wispy layer of similar ebony strands. She was raising the child above her head, as their chubby hands reached towards her. Her gray eyes were almost closed as she smiled, carefree, at the other girl who was kneeling by her thigh. Her blonde hair was pulled into small pigtails at the base of her head, while a telltale cowlick sprung insistently at her crown. One hand reached towards the toddler in the woman’s hold, while the other was braced on her leg, fingers bunching into the soft gray skirt which sheathed her legs. From the angle the picture was taken, the blonde girl’s profile was just visible enough for a lavender eye to be discerned, as she looked towards the woman.

Blake’s head tilted to the side as she studied the photo. The woman bore a strong resemblance to Ruby; she could easily guess the girl would look just like her in a few years’ time. 

Could this be her mother? She turned her focus to the blonde girl, and assumed she was Yang, before reaching the conclusion that the toddler was Ruby. Why wasn’t the woman with her daughters? Where was she now?

She frowned, slightly, as she looked at the smiling woman in the picture.

Footsteps padded behind her, and with their presence she jolted out of her reverie. She turned in her place, and considered herself lucky that her ears didn’t flinch atop her head. 

The sight of Ruby, her arms ladened with clothing, greeted her once she focused. The girl peered at her over the top of the pile, the twin moons of her eyes barely cresting the hill she held, and then she dumped it unceremoniously on the bed at Blake’s side. 

“Here you go,” she announced, “Yang found some stuff for you to have. There’s a toothbrush and a towel in there too.”

Blake’s eyes flicked towards the pile. She wondered if Yang had given them up willingly, or if Ruby had strong-armed them out of her sister’s possession.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. She reached out to pick through the offered supply, discerning a faded yellow sweatshirt and gray sweatpants in the pile.

Ruby watched her as she sorted out the various items, her arms crossed over her chest, and seemed to be lost in thought while Blake put aside the clothing. She glanced up when she realized she was being watched, and met the girl’s stare. 

Ruby’s jaw worked as they stared at each other for a moment. Then her eyes darted towards the nightstand.

The realization of what the girl was likely thinking struck Blake with a slight shock. She turned her head towards where Ruby was looking, and her eyes landed on the picture.

“I’m sorry,” she said immediately, and turned back to Ruby. The girl’s eyes darted to her in surprise. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

A sole eyebrow quirked over a silver eye as Ruby looked at her, questioningly. 

“Don’t be sorry,” she said quickly. She uncrossed her arms, and waved her hand in the air absently. “I don’t mind!”

She moved towards the nightstand, and then gestured at the picture frame. “That’s my mom and us.”

Blake looked at the picture again.

“Yang doesn’t look much like her,” she commented, quietly.

Ruby glanced towards her, just barely turning her head away from the object of their shared focus. “We’re half-sisters,” she explained. Her voice was light, as if she were unbothered by sharing this sort of information. “We both share a dad, but our moms are different.”

Well, that explained why Taiyang and Yang were carbon copies of each other, while Ruby shared little resemblance with them. Blake turned her attention towards Ruby, who had returned to looking at the picture. As Blake studied her, a wistful look overtook her features. 

A moment later, the girl shook herself out of her stupor, and turned to fully face Blake.

“Well! I’ll let ya get ready for bed,” she said lightly. “I mean, it’s kinda early if you want to sleep, but I’m gonna go watch some shows with Dad. You can join us if you’d like!”

Blake looked back towards the pile beside her. She thought of everything she would need to do the next day, which included faking a solution to her non-existent infestation problem, coming up with a reason to end her lease, and the prospect of returning to the apartment for, at the very least, her paycheck. She likely would want to get her own clothing as well, if Taiyang would allow her to stay in his home for a couple more days. 

As she thought of all the things that needed to be done, a wave of exhaustion crashed over her shoulders; the adrenaline of fleeing her apartment finally washed away, leaving her feeling as though she’d rather sleep for days than do anything that required conscious thought.

“I’m probably going to get ready for bed,” she murmured, and reached for the clothing, towel, and toothbrush Ruby had given her.

Ruby seemed to accept that with no further questions. She moved towards the doorway, while Blake picked up her items and went to follow her.

“There’s toothpaste on the sink, and you can use the hair stuff in the shower,” she explained. Then she paused, leaving Blake to nearly collide with her back. She spun on her heel, and Blake studied the thoughtful look on her face as the girl seemed to rethink what she had just said.

“Though, you should probably avoid the purple bottles,” she then warned, “those are Yang’s. She…kind of takes her hair super seriously.”

“And that stuff’s super expensive!” Yang’s voice called, faintly, from outside the room.

Ruby nodded. “Yup. But anything else in the shower’s fine for you to use!”

Blake looked down at Ruby as she finished her explanation, and then nodded. “Thank you,” she said again.

Ruby waved her off before she even finished speaking. “You don’t have to keep thanking us,” she said, and led the way out of her room. She flicked the light off as they went. “You’re our friend! We don’t mind helping you.”

Blake stuttered to a halt, frozen in the hallway, while Ruby made her way towards the kitchen. Her head swiveled to watch the girl go.

_You’re our friend,_ her mind repeated.

Her mouth opened, then shut, as she struggled to think of what to say in response to that.

It was unfathomable, to her. She’d only known these people for two weeks, and yet they were willing to take her into their home, to feed her and give her clothing, and let her sleep under their roof. Ruby had called her _friend_. 

She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that word directed at her; it sent a warm flood to spill throughout her veins as she held it in her mind. 

She shook her head to clear that feeling. It likely meant little to Ruby. Certainly she wouldn’t consider that word to mean the same thing that Blake did. She stared at Ruby’s back until she vanished into the kitchen, and then her eyes flicked towards the closed door which led to Yang’s room. She glanced towards the clothing in her hands; her fingers tightened in the fabric.

If someone had recently told her— even two weeks ago— that she would have been called friend, and welcomed into the home of a human family with wide arms, she would have laughed. It all seemed impossible. Everything was moving so fast; the world was a blur around her as she adjusted to no longer being on the run, but secure in one place. She already had people calling her their friend, despite knowing next to nothing about her.

She shook her head as she forced herself to enter the bathroom, in order to carefully pick apart what being called _friend_ meant in the privacy of the inviting shower.

..:|:..

The next morning, Blake entered the kitchen in search of food with bleary eyes and a growling stomach. She doubted there would be any tea in this household; none of them seemed the type to drink it.

She refused to scour through their fridge and their cupboards, as she stood aimlessly in the center of the room. But she had hoped they would at least have a banana or an apple laying on one of the counters that she could snatch.

Upon finding none, she resigned herself to having to wait for someone to wake and let her know what food she would be allowed to have. She returned to Ruby’s room to collect her Scroll from the nightstand, and made sure her bow was still fixed securely over her ears. 

She hadn’t removed it for the night, too wary of one of the girls bursting in while she slept to risk leaving herself exposed, even in sleep. Aches flared as she tightened the knot between them, and she held back a wince at the feeling, before she left the room. 

She went towards the living room, instead, and settled in the corner of the deep brown couch which faced the window. As she looked at her Scroll, she figured she may as well try to keep up the charade of the roach infestation, and directed the device to search for exterminators in her area.

After some time spent scrolling down the list of available businesses, Blake eventually settled on a random one to claim as the exterminator she had in mind for her imaginary problem. She set her Scroll down once she had finished; and her attention was drawn to the pictures hung on the wall above her.

She rose to her feet, examining them. 

A majority of them featured Taiyang and his daughters at various stages in their lives; plenty depicted a young Yang clambering over her father’s back, while a miniature Ruby clung to his leg. Two pictures showed the sisters in their graduation caps and gowns, holding their Academy diplomas and each grinning fiercely at the camera. Some also had a man who Blake didn’t recognize in them, as well; with graying black hair, and pale red eyes, the color of his irises almost washed out and clouded over. He wasn’t in many of the photos, maybe only a couple, but Ruby and Yang seemed to hold onto him just as tightly as they did Taiyang. Blake wondered if he was a relative of some sort.

Though none of the pictures had Ruby’s mother in them, from what Blake could tell. She looked over all of them again, to make sure she hadn’t missed the woman’s presence accidentally. 

She hadn’t. She frowned, as she realized that. Perhaps she and Taiyang had split up.

It wasn’t her place to pry about that sort of thing, however.

She heard noise clatter from the direction of the kitchen, as she studied one of the pictures which contained the unfamiliar man. With that distraction breaking her trance, she decided to return to the direction the sounds came from, hoping for food. She picked up her Scroll from the couch as she moved.

When she entered the kitchen, she found Taiyang just as he placed two bowls down on the counter next to the stovetop. 

She wasn’t sure how to announce her presence, so she pretended to look busy on her Scroll as she waited for him to notice her.

It didn’t take him long. She saw him turn around out of the corner of her eye, and he paused once he registered that she was stood in the archway leading to the dining room.

“Well! Good morning,” he said. He moved away from her then, and went towards a sliding wooden door at the end of the room. Blake watched as he opened it, revealing a set of shelves piled with various boxes and metallic bags. “I saw your door was open. I hope you don’t mind cereal for breakfast?”

He held out a box, which Blake inspected with a cursory glance. She wasn’t picky with her food; she could never afford to be.

“That’s fine,” she said.

Taiyang returned to the bowls, and filled them each with brown flakes. 

“Neither of the girls are gonna be up for at least a few more hours,” he explained as he went about preparing the bowls. He returned the cereal box to the shelves, and then retrieved a carton of milk from the fridge at Blake’s side. “Usually, I’m the only one awake at this time. I’m surprised you’re up so early!” He opened a drawer, and then put spoons into each of their bowls.

Blake offered him a small smile as he turned and offered her one. She took it from him with both hands, and then followed him as he went into the dining room.  


“I’m usually up at dawn,” she said, and settled into the chair she had sat in the previous evening. Taiyang returned to the seat he had occupied, as well. She glanced down at her Scroll, taking note of the fact that it was almost 10 in the morning. She must have been more exhausted than she originally thought. “I guess I slept in too much today.”

Taiyang shrugged, and dug into his cereal. “It’s the weekend,” he said lightly, “you’re allowed to stay in bed as long as you want.”

Blake nodded, and then focused on her food.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, though it was a comfortable quiet to her. Sunlight filtered through the window at Taiyang’s back, and as she glanced up at him, she realized he was watching her. His features were relaxed, and he returned to his cereal after a moment.

“So, have you looked into someone for your problem yet?” Taiyang asked.

Blake stirred her spoon throughout the flakes, creating small whirlpools that they swirled within.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve already got something set up.”

Taiyang hummed at that. “That was fast!” he said. “Who’d you get? If it’s one of the guys I know, I could probably get you a discount.”

Blake froze as she toyed with her cereal. Internally, she chastised herself for forgetting that he had offered to recommend some exterminators to her. She thought, belatedly, that she should have gotten their names before she chose one at random.

She glanced up at Taiyang as he watched her, waiting for her answer. She took in a small breath, hoping that the random one she had chosen wasn’t one of the ones he knew, and then told him the business’s name.

Taiyang nodded once she finished.

“Huh. I don’t know them,” he said. 

Blake held back a sigh of relief. She looked down into her cereal, and returned to creating imaginary patterns in the milk.

That was one of her goals taken care of. But she still needed to think of a solution to her _actual_ unwanted resident problem, she thought with a small frown directed at the swirling flakes in her bowl. 

It was probably best that she take another day, at least, to get her story straight for her landlord. The woman probably wouldn’t speak with her until the week started, anyways. But that meant there were still two days until that would happen. Two days that she’d potentially have to spend back in the apartment, with the man she was eager to forget about.

She already felt guilty enough staying at her boss’s home for one night. But she wasn’t sure she could stomach the prospect of spending the weekend in uncomfortable cohabitation with a spirit.

“If it’s alright, can I…stay another night? The exterminator said he’d be by tomorrow,” Blake said. Her heart twinged as the lie left her mouth, but she forced it away from showing on her face as she moved to eat a spoonful of cereal. Her eyes darted to look up from her food as she waited for an answer.

Taiyang was already nodding before she finished. “It’s fine,” he said. “Do you want to at least go get your own stuff, in the meantime?”

Blake nodded, herself. “If that’s alright,” she said.

Taiyang waved his spoon in the air in front of him. “Of course it’s alright,” he said. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere! Would you want one of us to come with and help?”

_No_ , Blake thought harshly. She shook her head, rather than voicing her protest in that way. “It’s okay,” she said instead. “I’ll just get a change of clothes. It’s not a big deal.”

It wouldn’t do to have anyone else at her apartment to realize there was a suspicious lack of roaches crawling throughout her kitchen.

Or to witness her attempts to control her reaction to the spirit she was trying to escape from.

Taiyang accepted her declination with no further questioning, and they both finished their cereal in silence. He rose from his seat to bring his bowl into the kitchen, and grabbed Blake’s from in front of her before she could stand up, herself.

She moved to follow him, at least hoping to help clean up. But he had already begun rinsing both bowls in the sink by the time she stopped in the archway, and so she resigned to thinking of what to do next.

“I’m…going to go get my stuff now,” she then announced. “Can I help with anything?”

Taiyang didn’t look at her as he shook his head. “It’s alright,” he said. “We’ll leave the front door unlocked when you get back. You can just walk in. Don’t worry about knocking.”

Blake watched as he set the bowls and spoons on the side of the sink to dry.

“Thank you, Taiyang,” she said softly. She couldn’t voice what she was thanking him for; for giving her a place to work, and a place to stay. For giving her the opportunity to be called _friend_.

Taiyang turned to face her then, and the expression on his face was unreadable to Blake. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought him to be sad…but when he spoke, his voice was far too light for that.

“Call me Tai,” he said. He smiled at her, and then moved to leave the kitchen, in the direction of the hallway behind him. “We’ll see you in a bit.”

Blake stood in the kitchen alone after he left, and she stared at the archway he’d left through for a few moments. 

“See you in a bit,” she said under her breath. Then she shook her head, and went to retrieve her keys from Ruby’s room.

When she pulled into her allotted parking space in front of her apartment, Blake’s heart was pounding in her chest.

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel as she sat, staring at the pedestrians who strode past her car. The foot traffic was heavy even in the early afternoon of the weekend, and many in the sharply dressed crowds eyed her vehicle with arched brows. 

She did her best to ignore their scrutiny, and turned her ignition off. She pulled her key out, and put it in her coat pocket with a shaking hand. The dark plaid of it clashed against the yellow of her borrowed sweatshirt, just as her boots looked ridiculous with the gray sweatpants she wore, but she couldn’t care less about her appearance in that moment.

_It won’t take long,_ she reminded herself, as she got out of her car. A biting wind cut into her cheeks and whipped throughout her hair, threatening to expose the blank expanse on her skull where human ears should have been. She tugged the strands back into place on either side of her head as best as she could, before locking her car and jogging across the street, towards the sidewalk in front of her apartment.

Once she reached her destination, she hesitated in moving for the front door, as she had intended. 

Her eyes drifted towards one of the alleyways between her apartment and one of her neighbors. 

And then her feet followed shortly after.

It was a thin space; the alley led to the walled-in backyards, and was lined with trash bins. 

Her eyes trailed up the wall of her apartment, looking for a window she could reach up towards and peer through. 

Maybe she was being too paranoid, she thought. She could have hallucinated the spirit— it would explain why she hadn’t seen him before that day. Or, if she hadn’t, she hoped to catch a glimpse of where he was in the apartment, so she could be prepared for his presence before she entered.

She found a window low enough for her to reach, one which she knew overlooked the entirety of the living space, set directly across from her lone couch. 

After a moment of staring up at the window, which was set a foot or so above her head, she jumped up, and grasped onto the sill with both hands. She pulled herself up, holding back a grunt as she strained.

She pressed her face close to the glass once she was close enough, and her eyes darted over the empty room in front of her.

Nothing looked out of place. The tower of cardboard boxes was still stacked beside the blue couch, with some spilling over into one of the two available seats. Her dining set was still unused. She tilted her head, trying to peer up into the loft— but it was too high up for her to get a good view. She looked down towards the part of the hallway leading to the front door instead, and noted the lack of a blue glow.

Then, she turned her head towards the sliding doors leading to the backyard.

She held her breath as she realized that _he_ was stood outside the glass.

His back was to her, thankfully; he still wore the white sweater and black sweatpants she had last seen him in, and the haze was prominent over his shoulders. His tail hung limp at his back, disappearing through the wooden boards he was stood on. It was disconcerting to see; if it weren’t for the fact that his tail was fazing through the floor, and the strange blue fog around him, she wouldn’t have known he wasn’t real.

He was crouched at the corner of the wooden deck, reaching off of it towards something in the grass. Blake hung onto the window, watching for what he was trying to do.

A small, thin black tail shook gently, just past the crook of his arm.

Blake blinked, and a moment later a cat’s head poked through the man’s arm entirely. The rest of it followed a moment later, as the creature jumped up onto the deck.

It didn’t seem to realize he was there. At least, not consciously. It wouldn’t stray far from his place on the deck, always returning to that corner when it wandered too far, but neither did it acknowledge his presence.

The man didn’t turn towards it at first, instead keeping his attention forward and his arm reached out, as if he were trying to beckon something closer to him.

She wondered if there were more cats in the yard. And also why she had never seen them in her backyard until now.

Her unspoken question was answered when, a heartbeat later, the head of a fluffy orange cat poked up from the edge of the deck at the man's side.

As she watched the black cat complete another circuit around her deck, the man’s head turned to look over his shoulder, his gray eyes searching for the one that had jumped through him. The eye she could see was crinkled at the corner, as though he had been smiling at the creatures as they weaved around him.

Then his gaze rose, and inadvertently met hers.

Blake startled at the same time he did. He leapt to his feet, the smile falling fully from his face. His tail came into full view from outside of the deck while he spun, and his mouth fell open into a soft 'o' of surprise. He hovered a few inches off of the wood as they looked at each other, before he eventually floated back down to rest firmly on the surface.

Blake immediately fell off of the windowsill, and her ankles twinged painfully once she landed on her feet.

She bustled away from her vantage point, her face burning as she burst out onto the sidewalk once more. She hoped no-one else saw her peering into her own apartment, thinking her to be an opportunistic— and very stupid— thief.

As she went to her front door, she figured she at least knew now that she hadn’t been imagining the ghost. But _he_ also knew she had returned, she thought, and she fiercely jerked her key in the lock once that thought came to her.

She pulled the door open forcefully, and then took a deep breath as she stared at the wall across from her.

When she stepped through the doorway, she was cast into a world of shadow.

She held her breath as the door clicked shut behind her, the sound muffled by the low ceiling of the entryway. Clutching her keys close to her chest, she strained to discern any sort of sound which could emanate from further in the apartment. She stood still, and leaned forward slightly, almost raising onto the balls of her feet.

Then she shook her head. She pocketed her keys, and strode towards the kitchen. She wouldn’t cower in the presence of the spirit in her apartment. She was only here to collect her things, and then return to Tai’s house and begin to plan her excuse to her landlord for why she needed to end her lease a year before it was supposed to be up.

The parts of the kitchen and the living room that she hadn’t been able to study through the window were exactly as she had left them. She glanced towards the counter, where her paycheck rested in solitude amongst her plants. 

She walked towards it, and her fingers reached out. Not for the paper, but for the leaves of the flowers blossoming in the terra-cotta pots. 

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, and took one of the petals between her fingers. Still velvet-soft, she noted as she rubbed it. She went to retrieve a glass from one of the cupboards, and filled it with water before returning to the plants. The sound of water sloshing into dirt broke the solitude as she poured the glass's contents into the pots, where her plants greedily drank.

Then she set the glass down, and turned her focus towards the deck outside the glass doors.

The backyard was empty. The cats were gone; as was the spirit.

She frowned at the realization, and then went up the stairs to the bedroom.

The air felt stale, in the loft. Blake’s ears twitched irritably against the silence, and she shook her head to try and clear the sensation further.

_Just get enough to last for a couple days,_ she directed to herself.

Her old duffle bag, a worn purple so faded it was almost gray in the low light, was stuffed beneath her bed. She bent down to grab the ratty, deflated thing, before throwing it atop her bed. She crawled after it, and kneeled on the mattress to pull clothes at random from the shelf above her head. She shoved them in the bag until she was satisfied she had enough to get her through the weekend, and then got off the bed.

When she returned downstairs, the shadows in the empty corners seemed bolder. Sharper to her eyes. She avoided them as she shouldered her bag, and then returned to the counter and her plants. She grabbed her paycheck, shoving it into her pocket, and began to turn away…but then she paused, and glanced towards the scattered terra-cotta pots.

She sighed. As much as she didn’t want to spend any more time in the apartment, she would feel even more guilty if she left the plants to dry up in the darkness. She turned then, but instead of going towards the entryway, she went over to the pile of cardboard boxes that she had yet to throw out. She picked one at random, and then returned to the counter to put the plants gingerly in the container.

Once she was finished, she lifted the box. The pots clinked together in discordant sound, and her ears flattened to her hair against the sensation.

Then finally, she walked towards the front door.

Her footsteps seemed…too loud on the carpeted floor. She hadn’t removed her boots; they thudded against the floor with each step, and she felt imagined eyes on the back of her head as she went.

When she reached the front door, she almost let out a sigh of relief. Her free hand reached out, while the other tightened around the box in her grasp.

“Wait!”

Blake paused. Her fingers lowered from the door handle. Before moving, instead, to tighten around the strap of the bag, slung over her shoulder.

A moment passed. Then, a haze of blue light fluttered out of the corner of her vision— and the hem of black sweatpants, from what she could discern, which fluttered past her shoulder. She kept her gaze resolutely on the dull carpet as she ignored the spirit that had decided to float in front of her.

She didn’t look up.

Before her eyes, the image of cracked asphalt and faded yellow paint flickered, layered overtop the floor of her apartment.

“You…” the voice sounded rushed, as though it were out of breath. Blake wondered how that was possible. Surely that was just residual behavior left over from when it was still alive. Or perhaps spirits did have to exert themselves in some way? It wasn’t a thought she’d ever given consideration to. She didn’t raise her gaze to see for herself if it were the case, however.

“You should stay! Your plants, uh…they’ll be thirsty.”

She kept her hold on the cardboard box holding her smaller planter pots very still; though her hand twitched despite her efforts, drawing it closer to her abdomen. She turned her head to the side by a margin.

What could she even say, in a situation like this?

Better to say nothing at all.

Her heart pounded against her ribcage as the silence stretched. She continued to stare at the floor, gaze vacant and cold. 

She urged her legs to move. For herself to press forward, and for her arm to take hold of the handle and open the front door. But her body wouldn’t respond to her commands; she was frozen in place, pinned down by the ghost who was no doubt staring at her with pleading eyes.

She didn’t want to look at him. To do so would mean acknowledging that he was real, and that was tantamount to any level of personal suffering she could imagine. It was better to pretend that she was normal. Better to pretend that she couldn’t see spirits at all. She tried again to reach for the door.

But a twinge pulled somewhere underneath her heart, stopping her from carrying out her escape. She didn’t look up as it pulsed, but she frowned in response. The strange, melancholic feeling, which had arrived so suddenly, felt like something akin to… _pity_. 

She didn’t know what to make of that. It was a mistake, surely. She couldn't pity what she couldn’t see—

A hand splayed out, then, across the floor. Blake startled, and her plants jostled noisily in their container. She took a step backwards, but didn’t raise her head. Though, out of the corner of her eye, she could still discern the figure prostrated before her.

“I’m sorry!” he exclaimed. His voice was muffled, somehow, by the floor which was mere centimeters from his face.

Blake still kept her eyes away from him. Her gaze lifted to focus on a random point further in the apartment, but she kept him in her periphery all the same.

“I…didn’t know what to do when you came here, so I hid. It's been so long since anyone was here. I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t know anyone could see me.”

Well, Blake could. And she’d done a horrible job of hiding it.

“I didn’t do anything weird!” the spirit continued, “I just stayed away whenever you were home.” As he spoke, he rose to his feet. Blake noticed that he was taller than her, by at least a head’s length. She didn’t flinch as he moved towards her.

“I can stay away from now on if that makes you feel better. Just…”

She still refused to look directly at him, but she could feel the weight of his stare fixed on hers as if it were a physical presence on her skin, and out of the corner of her eye she watched his fingers clench into fists at his sides.

“Just please don’t leave because of me.”

Blake’s ears twitched, then, as he finally went silent.

**_“Don’t go…”_ **

She leaned towards the front door; all she had to do was open it. She could escape the spirit, and the memories it drew out of her mind which likewise haunted her. All it would take...was a simple reach. She looked towards the sliding glass doors at the other end of the apartment; in their reflection, she thought she could see two purple backpacks.

She sighed. Her fingers creaked as they tightened on the box she held. 

And then her eyes flicked to meet his. 

His eyes were so dark in the absence of any light, she thought. They were a dense shade of gray— a familiar color. They were far different from the silver in Ruby’s eyes, to which she compared his, but mesmerizing all the same; where Ruby's were the brightness of the moon, his were the tides which obediently followed it. Dark. Depthless. The shades were echoes of each other, but just different enough to belong to distantly related families.

In contrast to the storm-clouds in his eyes, his blond hair still seemed to glow against his tan skin; though how much of that effect was owed to the cerulean haze which covered him like a cloak, she wasn’t sure.

He didn’t react as she studied him. His shoulders were stiff, his hands still clenched at his sides, and the longer Blake looked at him, the more that twinge at the base of her heart continued to pulse.

She finally turned, breaking away from his darkened stare, and turned towards the front door.

He sighed quietly, once she did. As if he had been bracing for her departure, yet the reality of it still hit him stronger than he had been expecting.

Her fingers curled around the door handle. She pressed down, and the lock unlatched with a quiet click.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” she said. She didn’t turn away from the door, but she knew he would understand that she was addressing him. “We can talk then.”

She was through the door before she had the chance to realize the words which had left her mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize I'm moving at a snail's pace getting to the blacksun stuff; but we're getting there! The more I write of this, the more this is turning out to be as much a Blake story as it's going to be a blacksun story. Please let me know your thoughts, I'd love to hear them!


	3. Chapter 3

She didn’t return to Patch at first, after leaving her apartment. Instead, she simply shut her brain off, and drove.

It was a habit of hers, one which ran bone-deep. Running away from problems when they became too heavy to carry was as natural to her as breathing. Dropping everything and starting over where the past couldn’t catch her. Ignoring her fears until she no longer remembered what they looked like, even if she could still feel them underneath the surface.

It was what made her look away when she saw the shadows on the sidewalk. It was what led her to Atlas City in the first place. It was what led her to Taiyang and his daughters’ house. It was what would be continuing to warn her to escape her apartment, just as quickly as she had signed the lease.

All her life, she had been running. She never knew what it felt like to stand still.

Blake hated herself for it.

_Weak_ , her mind repeated viciously. Its voice was not her own; a deep, mocking timber edged with violence. It rumbled up from within the boxes which contained her worst memories, her worst experiences. She fought to shove their lids back down, to push the voice back where it belonged. Forgotten, as she ran from its owner, as well.

With time, she would also forget the spirit in the apartment. She would feel the weight of his eyes on her, recalling the way his pleas rolled off his tongue so easily whenever she tried to sleep. She would feel guilt for leaving him to languish. But the brightness of his hair would linger in her memory until it barely shone among the rest of her forgotten past. His eyes would get lost in the sea of kindred stares which fixed onto her back whenever she left. But she would move past it. She had done so before; she could do it again.

She wondered what he must think of her. How cowardly he would find her. A woman so afraid of the shadows that she ran at the first acknowledgement that they were real. She would laugh, if she were in his place.

It wasn’t fair, she thought, not for the first time in her life. She had never asked for any of this. Her life being one continuous string of bad luck, with the odds being ever-stacked against her, wasn’t something she wanted. She just wanted to live normally. She just wanted to be normal. It was why she covered her ears, why she looked away whenever she saw the dead. But it still wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t fair.

To her surprise, she eventually wound up in Patchwork’s parking lot.

She pulled her car around in the lot so that she faced the empty street, with the planter boxes which lined the sidewalk pressed close to the front of her vehicle. She idled in silence, looking out towards the buildings which faced her. Miscellaneous business signs greeted her eyes, a barber shop on the far end, a convenience store directly across from her. Random windows were boarded up and barricaded on the upper levels; she wondered when the last time was that anyone had gone up to those floors.

She rested her hands in her lap as she looked out of her windshield, and then rested her forehead on the cool steering wheel.

_“I’ll be back in the morning. We can talk then.”_

Her voice sounded so strange in her mind. It was as if an entirely different Blake had spoken those words. She certainly had no idea where the promise had come from. It had risen from her thoughts, unprompted, and bubbled over her lips before she knew what she was doing. Now she had to deal with the aftermath.

She hadn’t spoken to a ghost in four years, and here she was making a promise to one she didn’t even know.

She banged her head lightly against the wheel. _Stupid_ , she thought. _Being impulsive like that will get you killed._ Allowing herself to indulge in that sort of careless behavior was a slippery slope, after all.

Then she paused. And she wondered, not for the first time…

Why hadn’t he reacted to her ability to see him?

She raised her head slowly, leaning back in her seat. Her gaze tilted to the side, sliding away from the row of storefronts before of her, towards the abandoned building on Patchwork’s right-hand side. It was shadowed beneath the heavy, gray clouds which blanketed the skies that day, appearing much more lonesome than usual.

Just as she expected, the woman stood before the street. The white shirt she wore was tinged with blue. The long curls of her hair, draping down past her shoulders, were haloed in the glow which surrounded the entirety of her frame.

Most spirits who even suspected Blake of being capable of seeing them would do anything to get her attention. She had learned to tune it all out; the screams, the reaching hands, the cries.

The woman’s foot stretched forward, and she dipped her toe off of the curb towards the road.

And the spirit in her apartment hadn’t been at all surprised to learn what she was capable of.

Blake frowned, as she watched as the woman continued in her strange ritual.

More than anything, in that moment, she was curious as to what that revelation meant. She didn’t think she had given any indication of her abilities; she hadn’t even been aware of the man’s presence for the first two weeks she had lived in the apartment. Which, on its own, was a testimony to either her outstanding lack of awareness, or his ability to hide himself away. Both options were unnerving in their own rights, and she wasn’t sure which was more than the other. 

Her eyes remained on the woman as she mused. She wanted to know the answer to it. She wanted to know why he was there in the first place. He was turning out to be quite the puzzle for her, it would seem.

What was that saying, about curiosity and the cat?

Blake sighed, and with that thought lingering over her head, finally started her engine once again. Her eyes slid away from the spirit as she pulled her car out of Patchwork’s parking lot. She supposed she would get her answers soon enough. She had made a promise, after all.

..:|:..

When Blake returned back to Tai’s household, she was immediately accosted by a blur of maroon at the front door.

She flinched backwards, away from the finger that was being pointed in her face. Her eyes crossed as she watched it waver just before her nose.

“Hey!” Ruby said, her voice shrill.

Blake blinked at her as she cradled her duffle bag in both arms, and remained silent. Ruby poked at it. “I would’ve offered to come along, you know!”

She pushed past Ruby then, and stepped into the living room, gently kicking the front door shut behind her as she went. Ruby took a step backwards, though the girl's scowl didn’t disappear while she moved to kick her boots off.

She wondered what this was about. It wasn’t like she was moving out of her apartment yet; and she certainly wouldn’t have accepted the offer for help, had Ruby actually made it.

“You weren’t up,” she explained, in an attempt to be more polite than her thoughts, “and I didn’t need help. It’s just a change of clothes.”

_And my plants,_ she finished silently. She held off a scowl which threatened to flicker across her face. Why had she brought them with her? She was only planning on staying with Tai and his daughters for another night.

Soft amber eyes suddenly overlapped over Ruby’s cool silver, and with them, Blake had her answer. She looked away to avoid seeing her mother.

She turned towards the dining room to further escape the memory, though Ruby was close on her heels.

“Yeah, but I want to see your place sometime,” she called to her back.

As Blake turned the corner, she saw Yang sitting in the chair Tai had occupied the previous evening and that morning, staring blearily into a bowl of cereal. She nodded in greeting at the blonde girl, who returned the gesture once her eyes flicked up.

She passed through the kitchen in silence, while Ruby trailed behind her. The door to Yang’s room was open, and Blake caught a quick glimpse of florescent orange walls, illuminated by sunlight streaming through the open shades over the windows on the far wall. She felt glad that they hadn’t given her that room to stay in for the night; her eyes would surely go blind from the brightness.

When she returned to Ruby’s room, she set her duffle bag onto the bed, and sat down beside it. Ruby entered shortly after, and the two stared at each other as Blake thought of how to respond to what the girl had said.

“It’s…really not all that exciting,” she finally said. She wanted to dissuade Ruby from any notion of coming to the apartment; it wouldn’t do to have the girl around while Blake was trying to figure out how to best handle her unwanted resident. “I haven’t even unpacked everything yet. It’s not fit for people to come over.”

That was a lie, and a very weak one at that, but she figured it was the best she had without bluntly telling Ruby no.

It was clear Ruby wasn’t buying it when her eyebrow lifted over her eye, and she crossed her arms.

Blake frowned, minutely, as she watched Ruby. A twinge of guilt flared up in her chest; she had, after all, been quick to ask that Ruby and her family accept her into their house after her reaction the previous night. What excuse did she have to not allow Ruby into her apartment, aside from the fact that she had lied about her reason for not wanting to be there in the first place?

She told herself it didn’t matter. She didn’t owe Ruby entrance into her apartment. But she certainly felt selfish once she realized the circumstances of the situation she had concocted.

After a few moments of staring at each other in silence, Ruby shrugged.

“You got out of it for now,” she said. And then she wagged her finger at Blake, as if she were scolding her, while a grin grew across her face. Blake feared what that meant. “But you’ll let me come over sometime! We’ve gotta give you the housewarming party you deserve!”

Blake’s eyes widened at that, and then she shook her head. “I really don’t need that,” she said quickly.

Ruby was already nodding before she finished speaking.

“Sure you do!” she said. “New city, new apartment, new car…” She ticked off each item by tapping on her fingers. “There’s a lot of new’s there to celebrate! Just think about it.”

Blake wouldn’t think about it, but she wasn’t going to say that aloud. She sighed, and moved to pull her Scroll out of her pocket. It was almost one in the afternoon; she wondered what she should do for the rest of the day. It occurred to her, then, that she didn’t really have a plan for what to do moving forward.

Should she call her landlord at the start of the week? What would she say? What excuse would be important enough to warrant cutting off her lease a year early, while also leaving no evidence for the woman to find?

She didn’t know, but she had the rest of the weekend to plan it out.

As she sat in thought, Ruby continued to study her, looking for something on her face. Blake’s eyes flicked up from the screen of her Scroll to meet Ruby’s, who startled slightly once Blake’s attention settled on her.

“What is it?” she asked.

Ruby fidgeted in place. “Well,” she started, “remember the flower shop Dad told you about yesterday?”

Blake thought back to the peonies on the dining table. “Yeah,” she answered.

“I’ve gotta go up there today to drop off some order forms. I totally forgot to do it yesterday. Would you…wanna come with me?”

Blake ran her finger over the screen of her Scroll as she thought the offer over. After a moment, she figured she’d take the bait. “Where’s the shop?”

Ruby smiled knowingly. “In Mantle. It’s a bit away from Patchwork, but you’ll be able to find it just fine.”

That sounded do-able, as long as it was far enough away from her apartment to not warrant a quick visit— “ _I’ll_ be able to find it?” Blake repeated suddenly, incredulous. Ruby’s smile widened.

“I’ll pay you for gas!” she exclaimed, holding her hands up.

Part of her wanted to stay back and not go anywhere for the rest of the day, to hole up in the bedroom and not leave until it was time for dinner. A larger part of her recognized that doing this would get Ruby off her back about going to her apartment, and that portion of her brain was currently controlling her decision making.

She also, maybe, was curious to see what the flower shop looked like. She’d never been in one. 

She wouldn’t admit that last part to Ruby, though.

Blake stared at her for a few moments, before sighing. She stood up from the mattress, and then gestured at her duffle bag. “Can I get changed, first?” She asked.

Ruby nodded eagerly, before she darted out of the bedroom. 

She wondered, as she opened her bag and pulled out her first article of clothing, if this was going to somehow end up being something she regretted.

When she emerged from Ruby’s room, she felt much more comfortable. Her own clothes weren’t better by any means to the ones which had been provided to her by Yang, but her black jeans and soft white sweater were far preferable to the bright yellow she’d been wearing before.

“…Tell her I say hi. It’s been forever since she’s been by the shop.” 

Tai’s voice emerged from down the hall. Blake followed it, hoping it would lead her to Ruby. She passed through the empty kitchen and dining room, before finding her in the living room. She was sprawled out on the brown sofa, along with her sister, who was lazily scrolling through various channels on the projector sat on the table across from them. Taiyang stood behind them both, his hands resting on the back of the seat.

Ruby’s head tilted back across the arm of the couch to view Blake upside down. She flipped in her seat, and offered her a smile.

Blake nodded towards the front door. “Ready?” she asked.

The girl sat up, and moved towards the shoe pile.

Yang seemed to care enough about what was happening to take her eyes off the projector. She glanced towards Blake. “Wait, where’re you two going?” 

“Gotta go drop off some forms for work,” Ruby answered. A rustle of paper sounded off at Blake’s side, and she turned her head to witness Ruby waving a folder in her hand.

Blake went to pull her boots on while Ruby struggled with her own. Yang watched the pair of them for a moment, before she returned her attention to what she had been doing before.

“You wanna come with?” Ruby offered, after successfully tugging on her second shoe. Blake watched as Yang twitched. Her voice took on a sing-song quality as she continued. “I’m pretty sure Blake and I won’t be the only ones there…”

Yang shook her head fiercely, making the blonde strands of her hair wave wildly. “I think I’m good,” she said. 

Ruby snickered. 

Blake felt entirely out of the loop.

“Nowhere else you two need to stop before you get back?”

Blake turned around to see Tai standing in the entryway to the dining room, still in his pajamas as he had been when Blake had last seen him. She waved at him, though she chastised herself for it even as he waved back at her. Behind her, she heard Ruby hum an assent.

“Well, be safe,” he said. His eyes darted towards the window, where a thick curtain of rain was descending upon the world outside.

She turned towards Ruby, who was nodding along with her father’s question. She shoved the folder in her hand underneath her maroon sweatshirt, and then reached over to unlatch the front door.

“We’ll be back in a bit,” Ruby called over her shoulder, and then marched out onto the patio with no further delay. Blake cast one last look towards Tai, who had moved to take Ruby’s spot next to her sister. Then, she followed the girl out into the cold.

..:|:..

Although Mantle wasn’t as large as Atlas City itself, Blake was coming to learn it was still quite substantial in its own right. They had passed through the city’s borders twenty minutes ago, and still had yet to reach the flower shop which Ruby had profusely promised Blake that she would enjoy.

It also seemed to be as far away as possible from the direction of her own apartment, for which she was grateful. She was banking her hopes on Ruby being too excited to show off the place where she worked to remember her disappointment in not being able to latch onto Blake’s trip like a leech.

The city was unusually empty, at least on that day. Blake’s eyes darted over the road in front of her, even though there were few cars in sight. There were certainly no pedestrians traversing the sidewalks in the gloom.

“Alright, make a left up here. It’ll be the first one on the corner at the end of the block,” Ruby explained. It broke her out of the lecture on the differences between the newest models of Atlesian hovercraft, which she had been giving since before they entered the city.

Blake dutifully followed her instruction, and before they even made it onto the correct road, she was able to immediately identify the flower shop out of the row of other brick facades which faced them down.

_Myrtle Boutique_ was printed overtop a wall-length window which faced one side of the street, etched in bright blue letters that looped in immaculate cursive, and set against a backdrop of pure white paint which blanketed the wood that bordered the clear glass. As Blake turned the corner to the other side of the block, she saw an awning of blue and white stripes which ran the other length of the shop’s face, shielding the doorway from the rain which steadily poured down. A pair of colorful metal chairs sat next to the front door, bright purple and orange which stubbornly lit up the somber weather. Within the large windows, Blake could see tabletops stacked with various blooming arrangements.

“Here we are!” Ruby announced. She met Blake’s eyes, eagerly, as she looked at the girl who was clearly expecting a stronger reaction out of her than what she was giving thus far.

She looked away, and immediately spotted an available spot to stop along the length of the street on the opposite side of the shop. She parked, and then turned her head to inspect the window at the small, innocuous building in further detail.

The rain, combined with the lack of pedestrians on the slick, uneven sidewalk, made the shop look somewhat abandoned. The lights within it were on, spilling out to shimmer and refract throughout the rainfall, beckoning in what few souls wandered Mantle in this weather. What little she could see of the inside consisted entirely of flowers and leaves, brimming with a multitude of colors that swam together before her eyes. Outside the front door, which stood ajar, a small chalkboard had been set up to greet passerby, though Blake couldn’t read its face from the distance she was at.

“It’s cute,” she finally assessed, unable to think of anything else to offer.

The passenger door opened behind her a moment after, and she turned her head to see Ruby dart out into the rain, then shut the door behind her. She sighed as she mourned their lack of an umbrella, before she removed her keys from the ignition and followed her companion across the street. As she jogged to keep up, she did her best to cover her head with her hands, in order to shield her bow as she went. It didn’t prove very effective; by the time she reached the shop’s awning, she was well-drenched.

She glanced over her reflection, briefly, in the glass. As she studied her wavering figure, she guessed that her bow seemed to have held up well enough. At the very least, Ruby hadn’t exclaimed anything about ears being where they shouldn’t have been.

Ruby, who Blake realized, had already gone into the building, given that she appeared on the other side of the window as Blake inspected the top of her own head. She followed shortly after, and entered into a long, narrow shopping floor. The ceiling was low, and paneled in dark wooden planks from which colorful stained glass lamps hung on chains, placed over rows of tables laden with all manner of flower arrangements. Blake’s nose twitched at the scents which assailed her senses.

“Anyone home?!” Ruby called out into the empty store. She shook her head violently after she spoke, and droplets scattered from her hair in crystalline arcs. Blake stepped away from the torrent, her boots squeaking on the linoleum floor as she went.

She cast her eyes over the display areas, casually taking in the bouquets which greeted her. The air smelled heavily of sweet, fresh petals, and she gravitated towards an vase in front of her full of yellow daffodils, their bright petals drawing her in. Her hand reached out to grasp onto them, and she tilted her head as she looked the flowers over.

“I’m gonna go find my boss, this won’t take long,” Ruby told her, before walking quickly towards the back of the room.

In the meantime, while Blake began to make a slow circuit of the shop. All of the flowers were fresh and pristine; not a leaf seemed to be out of place. Blake found herself marginally impressed, as she stopped every few minutes to run her fingers through the plants. She wondered if Ruby had made any of these arrangements, as she glanced over a metal container which held a harmonious display of various white flowers.

Any manner of white flowers had been her mother’s favorite, she remembered. Their backyard had teemed with flowers such as these, once upon a time.

She bent low over them, and breathed in the slight smell which emanated off of their petals.

Blake had never been very good with flowers. She always found a way for them to dry out under her care; but it didn’t stop her from trying to cultivate some, all the same. She thought back to the flower pots she had in the back of her car, still in their cardboard box. Her mother would have been able to make them thrive.

Her chest ached at the thought.

“May I help you?”

Blake stiffened, and stood straight when the prim, unfamiliar voice emerged from behind her.  To their credit, her ears didn’t budge at the disturbance, for which she was thankful. 

She turned slowly, not wanting her boots to make unnecessary noise as she moved.  Her eyes dragged across the various vases beside her, before settling on the countertop which sat before an open doorway leading further into the shop.

A woman stood behind the surface, wiping her hands on a stark white apron as she looked at Blake, with piercing blue eyes that seemed to pin her to the floor. Her hair was white as snow, and tied at the back of her head in a long, loose ponytail which disappeared behind her shoulder. A thin scar carved a path over her left eye, starting just beneath a pale eyebrow and finishing its trail at the bottom ridge of her eye socket.

Blake felt her heart stop as she stared at the woman, with her pale hair and bright blue eyes.

There was only one family in the country of Atlas who had such distinctive features.

“I…”

In the span of a millisecond, Blake’s tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth. Her hands began to shake at her sides as her eyes fixated on the woman’s stare. She shoved them into the pockets of her coat, to hopefully conceal the tremors. She fought not to appear terrified, or furious, or a mixture of the two; though as she stared at the woman, she viciously wondered what else the universe was going to throw into her path to try and turn her life upside down next. She saw snowflakes, twelve-pointed and sharp enough to cut, behind her eyes when she blinked.

The air remained still as she continued to look at the woman, awestruck. Her heart pounded in her ribcage when the woman’s eyes flicked towards the ribbon on her head— she begged her ears to remain still underneath the scrutiny, barely able to imagine the consequences of what would happen if they made their presence known just then— then returned to her own gaze a moment later.

She certainly was not helping her first impression by any means, judging by the way the woman’s eyebrow arched above her scarred eye with slow, dubious intent. Her hands stopped wringing in her apron, and she crossed her arms as she waited for Blake to respond to her question.

She desperately prayed, to whatever deities that may have existed, that this woman wasn’t who she suspected her to be.

Even if the ivory hair was enough of a reason to tell her otherwise.

“Oh, hey, Weiss. Do you have the schedule book—”

Ruby appeared in the open doorway a moment later, just behind the woman’s shoulder. She finally seemed to remember she’d left Blake in the front room to fend for herself against this startling revelation, as she waved at her in greeting.

“I see you guys have met. Weiss, this is my friend, Blake!” Ruby said, blissfully unaware of the tense waves rolling off of Blake’s frame in the silence. She clapped her hand onto the woman’s shoulder, who flinched against the weight, and turned her head to scowl at the girl. “Blake this is my boss—”

“Weiss Schnee,” the woman introduced abruptly, her voice clipped as she shook Ruby’s hand off of her shoulder.

Blake felt like her head was going to float off of her shoulders once that name was spoken aloud.

“…It’s nice to meet you,” she said back. Her voice was just as brusque, if not even more-so, and she made no move to approach the counter. She was plenty close enough to a Schnee in that moment, to satisfy any desire she may have had to get closer in a conventional social interaction.

Weiss’s eyebrow quirked back up. It seemed to be a common expression for her to make, having done it so easily. Still, she didn’t comment on Blake’s very insincere-sounding pleasantry. Instead, she turned to Ruby, then reached behind the counter. A moment later, she pulled out a thick maroon binder, overstuffed with papers sticking out in every direction from within its covers in haphazard fashion.

“Thanks,” Ruby said, before tossing the binder onto the counter. She flipped through its contents a moment later, and stuck her tongue between her teeth as she dragged her finger down one of the pages.

All the while, Weiss continued to scrutinize Blake with a hard stare.

Ruby seemed unaware of the heavy pressure in the air as she hunted for whatever information she had her sights set on. Blake kept her eyes off of the heiress as best as she could, turning her focus back to the flowers around her. Knowing who had likely arranged such flawless displays, however, had tarnished the effect their perfection had on Blake.

“So…how did you two meet?” Weiss eventually asked, while Blake focused very hard on studying one of the rose clusters at her side, with their pale pink petals streaked through with small white veins.

She looked at the heiress out of the corner of her eye, before her attention darted to Ruby— who was still engrossed in her search, and seemed unlikely to answer the question. She looked back towards Weiss.

“I bought a car from her dad’s workshop,” she answered.

Weiss nodded, while her eyes lit up in understanding. “I haven’t talked to Tai in a few weeks,” she said. “How’s the business doing?”

Blake fought to keep her expression smooth, even while the nickname so casually left Weiss’s lipsas if she spoke it frequently. How well did she know Ruby’s family, she wondered. Why was she running a hole in the wall flower shop, instead of a multi-million lien Dust empire? Her head spun to connect the image of the Schnee family legacy with the cloying smell of flowers in the air around her.

“We’re doing fine! Dad says hi,” Ruby said. Then she pulled a pencil out of one of the binder’s sleeves, and scribbled something into the margin of the paper her other hand hovered over.

After a moment she glanced up towards Blake. “You’ll never guess what car Blake got,” she announced. She smiled, smugly, as she shut the binder. She turned, and focused her attention on the heiress, who scowled at her.

“How am I supposed to know? I don’t know anything about cars,” she immediately snapped. Blake watched on silently as Ruby winked at her, which only seemed to irritate the woman more.

“Just take a guess,” Ruby urged. “It’s more obvious than you think.” She glanced at Blake, and rolled her eyes exaggeratedly.

Weiss huffed. “I don’t know!” she insisted.

The two were like cats and dogs, Blake thought. Ruby hounded the woman ceaselessly like an overeager puppy, egging her on to make a blind guess. Weiss postured and glared as she tried to fend off Ruby’s teasing remarks. She repeatedly pushed aside Ruby’s attempts to fling an arm over her shoulder.

Blake, deciding to take a small amount of pity on the woman for reasons unknown, interjected the conversation. “It’s the one Yang was working on, if you know about it,” she said. Weiss turned to her at the mention of the girl’s name, and her eyes widened in recognition.

“ _That_ ancient thing? It wasn’t working for three years!” she exclaimed.

“I thought you didn’t know anything about cars,” Ruby mumbled. She yelped when Weiss moved to slap at her arm, dodging out of the way in a blur of black and red.

Blake felt her eyelid twitch at that new bit of information, though she had to admit that her curiosity was overriding the sense of horror that had overtaken her senses when she had first realized who stood before her.

“You’ve known them for that long?” she asked.

Weiss turned back towards her. “Yes,” she answered. She glanced towards a point over Blake’s shoulder; likely the direction of the front door, where the rainfall still echoed persistently outside the shop. “I met Ruby and her family around the time I started Myrtle.”

That meant, potentially, that Weiss had been away from the Schnee conglomerate for at least three years. She wondered if the woman had any bodyguards hidden nearby; after all, the Fang would pounce on the opportunity if they learned that there was a main branch Schnee who had ventured too far from the flock.

It would be so _easy_ , she thought. She had walked straight into the flower shop with no suspicion cast on her. All it would take was a knife up someone’s sleeve. A handgun in the pocket of a jacket. It would be effortless, to make crimson stain through that pristine white apron. Someone could jump the counter before anyone had a chance to react, and remove the _heiress_ to the Schnee Dust Company, simply with a flick of their wrist, with a twitch of their finger.

Her fingernails bit into the meat of her palms as she clenched her fists tighter. _He_ would be so proud. It was his life’s goal to eliminate a Schnee, after all.

But was it ever hers? It was still so hard for Blake to tell where the one person she never wanted to become ended, and where she began. She stared, transfixed, at the white hair in front of her, and imagined it crusted with red.

The gears in her mind turned so fervently as she mused, that she didn’t realize that Ruby was, eventually, talking about her.

“…And Blake decided to work for us!” she exclaimed. Blake focused on Ruby when she heard her name spoken.

Weiss’s attention shifted to Blake at that announcement. Blake stood still as she endured another round of analysis from her unreadable blue eyes.

Her face, then, did the strangest thing: a smile lifted the corners of her lips, and she tilted her head as her expression loosened. “It sounds like you’re fitting into the family just fine,” she said.

Blake wasn’t sure how she made the comment sound like an insult, but her hackles rose at the insinuation.

“Yeah,” she replied shortly.

Ruby’s eyes darted between the two women as they fell silent once again. Blake wondered whether she could sense the strain, now. She very much wanted an excuse to leave the shop and, hopefully, never return. She could do without ever having to see white hair, and blue eyes, ever again in her lifetime.

Finally, the girl seemed to catch a hint, and she maneuvered around the counter after returning the binder to where Weiss had pulled it from.

“Well,” she said as she walked, “now that I’m all set…I think I’m ready to go. How about you?” She looked towards Blake, who immediately nodded her assent. Her head was beginning to ache, though she wasn’t sure which was the stronger source of her pain: the presence of a Schnee, or the smell of flowers.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” Weiss called, as Blake turned her back on the counter. Her legs hesitated as she registered the words; she doubted Weiss would be saying that if she knew where Blake had come from. If she knew what Blake had been thinking behind the cool mask of her expression, as they monotonously discussed cars and families.

“…You too,” she finally said, tossing the words over her shoulder. She stalked towards the front door, where the pelts of rain continued to bounce off of the gray sidewalk.

Once she was outside, she stood still underneath the awning. The sound of the rain on the vinyl wound its way into her ears. She tilted her head upward, after a moment, allowing a cool breeze to wash over the hollow of her throat.

Her head ached profoundly. Her fingers loosened in her pockets, twitching to raise towards her temples. She kept them where they were; her palms still stung from her nails digging into flesh. She then shut her eyes against the gray world, and sighed.

She had been face to face with Weiss Schnee…and no-one had died. It didn’t quite feel real. A year ago, she wasn’t so sure that claim could still have been possible. _What a wonderful difference a year can make_ , she thought, and snorted quietly. But with little delay, the bitter smile that had turned the corner of her lips fell back to rest in a frown.

Her family had done so much to Blake’s people.

_“Surely, the loss of one life isn’t anything compared to the thousands that’ve been sacrificed for her to afford the best life lien can buy?”_

She winced as her palms stung again; her fingernails bit back into the grooves they had dug into her skin before. She loosened her fists, consciously this time, and opened her eyes to stare up at the pale blue and white stripes above her head. As she stood in the steady downpour, she ruminated on that voice in her head. It troubled her. Though, she wasn’t sure if it were the words themselves, or the fact that she doubted how true they now were to her.

Her ears strained to flinch as the sound of footsteps began to grow louder through the open doorway at her side. Blake held them, and the rest of her body, still as she waited for the person to emerge. She hoped it wasn’t Weiss; she didn’t think she could take any more interaction with the heiress without losing her composure.

“Alright, I’m good. Sorry for the wait.” Ruby’s voice preceded her presence, and a moment after she spoke, her boots appeared at the corner of Blake’s sight. Blake turned her head to look down at the girl, who was staring at her with an unreadable expression in her eyes, and a frown on her lips.

“It’s fine,” she responded, and then she nodded towards her car, a red blotch among the gray landscape. “Shall we go?”

Ruby didn’t respond to her request, opting to jog out into the empty street and the heavy rain in silence. Blake watched her retreating back for a moment before she followed, bending her head forward to shield her eyes from the droplets. Her gaze darted over the rivulets of water streaming over the concrete at her feet as she ran. Once she reached the car, she jammed her key into the lock and threw herself into the seat, pressing the button to unlock the rest of the car doors as she shut her own.

The passenger door opened and shut at her side with a click and a thud, and Blake leaned back into her seat as she waited for Ruby to buckle in, staring vacantly out the windshield in silence.

She started the car once she heard the seatbelt click, before pulling it out onto the empty road.

The sound of the windshield wipers was too loud in the quiet. She stared resolutely through the raindrops on the window as she focused on not allowing her ears to move at the squeaks which emanated whenever she activated the arms.

Ruby spoke first, once they were a few blocks away from Myrtle Boutique. “Are you alright? You were kind of strange in there.”

Blake chewed on the inside of her lip as she wondered what to say in response. She was still feeling the shock of what she’d just experienced. Which led to another interesting question: how had she never heard of someone as prominent as Weiss veering away from her intended course?

“Your boss is _Weiss Schnee_? The heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, Weiss Schnee?” she finally asked. 

She hoped, despite voicing that realization aloud, that she would be wrong. There could be any number of Weiss Schnee’s out in the world, ones who weren’t multi-million lien heiresses. She fought to keep the veins in her temples from pulsing enough to be visible as she waited for the answer. Her headache was becoming far too prominent, as the full prospect finally settled on her. How was she supposed to reconcile that shining title with the owner of a minuscule florist’s shop on the edge of Mantle?

Ruby shrugged, as if it were the most common occurrence in the world. “She’s different from her family,” she said easily.

_I find that hard to believe,_ Blake thought. She kept that observation to herself, while she pulled the car out into an intersection.

As though she could sense Blake’s trepidation, Ruby continued. “She is! You’ve gotta get past her shell, sure, but she’s really nice once you get to know her! Besides, she hasn’t seen…”

Ruby trailed off.

Blake kept her eyes on the road until they reached a red light, several minutes after the girl had gone quiet. She turned her head to look in Ruby’s direction, taking her in as she stared down at her hands in her lap, a contemplative look on her face.

“…Hasn’t seen…” she prompted slowly, keeping her fingers loose on the steering wheel as she unsubtly dug for information.

Ruby twitched at her voice, and looked up towards the windshield.

Her eyes darted to meet Blake’s, wide as saucers, and pleading. “Look, you’ve just gotta believe me. Weiss is way different from the rest of the Schnees.”

That wasn’t much of a glowing endorsement, in Blake’s opinion. Especially not when the Schnee family were the heads atop the beast which kept the exploitable forces of the Faunus underneath a very heavy foot. She thought of the pristine mountain estates in the highest echelons of Atlesian society, that she would see broadcasted across the blue glue of the news stations every other night as one representative or another from the Schnee Dust Company announced yet another tragic accident, related to the Dust mines they profited from.

Her hands tightened around the wheel.

“I’m sure,” she said dryly.

A shuffling in the seat at her side indicated that Ruby was turning to face her. The stoplight finally turned from red to green, giving her an excuse to take her attention off of the conversation as she urged the car forward.

“You don’t believe me,” Ruby said. Her tone indicated she wasn’t voicing the sentence as a question.

Blake continued to keep her eyes firmly the road as she drove them out of Mantle.

There were many things she could say about the Schnees. There were many things she could say about _Weiss_ Schnee in particular. With her acting as the declared heiress to the family business, she had been part of the SDC’s public face since she was little more than thirteen years old. Blake had watched her grow on the projector screen; they were of similar ages, yet their worlds couldn’t have been any further apart. And now, it would seem, she was part of Blake’s life, no matter how loose the connection. Her fingers curled tighter around the steering wheel.

None of the things Blake had to offer were pleasant commentaries, and she doubted Ruby would be pleased to hear any of them.

The air grew increasingly tense, the longer she remained silent against the weight of Ruby’s thinly-veiled accusation. She fought the urge to twitch away from the laser-hot feeling of Ruby’s eyes on the side of her face.

“The Schnees aren’t my most favorite people,” she finally said. It was the least impactful answer she could give in that moment. But she couldn’t quite help herself, or the spite which stung like acid up her throat; before she knew what she was doing, she continued. “I’ve known people who have worked for them, and it didn’t turn out well. Just drop it.”

Ruby had nothing further to offer, after that. Blake drove them in silence from then on, as the city melted away around them into the grass-fields of the barren landscape which surrounded the backroads leading into Atlas City, obscured by the gray downpour of the sky.

..:|:..

_It had been raining all day, when Blake returned._

_She had been gone for weeks, running supplies to various cells of the White Fang, and running from the authorities who were dead-set on putting someone’s head on a stake for the latest string of robberies which had been committed in the Fang’s name. The fact that she had been carrying those stolen goods was of no consequence to Blake as she had delivered them to the Fang’s various storehouses throughout the port city of Vale._

_She lived in a forgotten part of town, a place where the Fang reigned supreme and the humans had little influence. When she had moved in, it was the first time in months that she lived in a house and not out of a car; though the building she stayed in was far from a large step up. The place likely would have been condemned for safety concerns if it were in a human neighborhood. But apparently, it was livable enough for the majority Faunus population._

_It was practically a shoebox, with faded green paneling and a rotting front porch set in front of the door. But when she walked through the door, it became home._

_“I’m home,” she called out into the darkness._

_She removed her shoes, throwing them carelessly into the open closet which sat beside her. Her ears twitched to discern any sign of movement in the building; but she heard nothing other than the creaking walls, the drips from the ceiling where water worked its way through the cracks._

_Her stomach growled eagerly, while she stood still. It was a reminder that she hadn’t eaten much in the last few days; she fiercely hoped someone had remembered to get groceries while she was away._

_She went down the narrow hallway leading from the front door, passing various closed doors as she went. No lights were on in the house; no-one who lived in it needed them._

_At the end of the hallway, a girl emerged from the doorway which led into the kitchen. As she moved, the inky shadows which clung to her tanned skin and long, brunette hair were slow to melt away from her frame. The paleness of her blue eyes shimmered in the gloom, and she picked at the plaid skirt of her school uniform as she leaned against the narrow doorway._

_Darker spots were scattered across the girl's skin like freckles. As Blake continued to look at her, they faded to a soft, gentle pink._

_“I wasn’t expecting you back until tomorrow,” she said quietly, though a tiny smile worked its way over her lips as she spoke._

_Blake returned the expression easily, and then answered the question the girl didn’t ask. “I finished my assignment early.”_

_She pushed gently past the girl, entering into the small kitchen. Rain pattered gently against the small window in front of the kitchen sink, and she moved for the refrigerator while the girl turned around to watch her with a curious stare._

_A lone apple sat next to a bottle of orange juice on the bottom shelf. Blake grabbed both of them eagerly, before shutting the door._

_“How’s it been here?” she asked, moving to leave the room._

_The girl followed close behind, and together they moved down the hallway. Blake debated on going to her room, turning towards the closed, scuffed door for a moment, before deciding on going into the sparse living room instead._

_“Quiet,” was the response. Blake moved for the green couch pushed against the left-hand wall, while the girl went to its counterpart which faced the holo-projector set on the far wall. “Yuma and Trifa are out on assignment, too. They left last week.”_

_Blake took a bite from her apple as she listened to what the girl was saying about the bat and spider Faunus they shared the house with, while she put her bottle of juice at her feet._

_“How was it for you, though?” the girl asked._

_Blake swallowed, and then reached for the remote which was laying on the cushion beside her. With the press of a button, the projector flickered to life, and she left it to play whatever news channel it had elected to focus on as background noise._

_“It was alright,” she said. She took another bite from her apple as the girl continued to watch her. “I had some run-ins, but nothing major. All the Dust got where it needed to go.”_

_A cartridge of fire Dust had exploded in her face as she had been smuggling it out of an SDC warehouse, but she didn’t need to tell Ilia about that. The soot had taken days to wash off her skin; that was enough embarrassment for her to have to deal with._

_The girl sighed, while on the projector the weather forecast switched away to another segment._

_“I wish I could help more,” she said. “It just makes me feel useless when you guys go out and I’m…here.” Her hand raised to trace a circle in the air, encapsulating ‘here’ into the small house they all shared. Her eyes darted down towards her feet, still sheathed in white socks, even as her scales flickered to a dull red._

_Blake sat up abruptly, and she lowered her apple to her lap._

_“Ilia,” she said, a harsh edge coloring her voice. Ilia looked up at her; the scales on her face and hands shimmered to a light purple as they stared at each other._

_Blake studied her carefully; her uniform had small tears along the seams, and thread-bare patches dotted her black jacket like the scales on her skin. It was the best she could get second-hand, but Blake remembered how happy Ilia had been to even get that. The Amitolas had worked so hard to get their daughter into a private school on the good side of town._

_“You’re doing enough,” she continued. Her voice grew softer, and she smiled in a way she hoped was encouraging when Ilia’s expression fell. “You’re the reason we have somewhere to stay. And you’ve got more important things to be doing than running around the city every night.”_

_Ilia laughed, humorlessly. “I don’t think homework is the same thing as what you’re doing,” she said._

_Blake shook her head. “Don’t be like that,” she chastised. Then she leaned back in her seat, allowing the cushions to absorb her further. “Tell me how school’s been going.”_

_She wasn’t sure how long they sat there, talking and enjoying the company they hadn’t had for the last few weeks. Blake nibbled slowly on her apple as she listened to Ilia talk animatedly about her classes, how excited she was for her chemistry course, all the things that she was able to do even with what little money her parents were able to send back from the mines every month, for the last year and a half. The Schnee Dust Company were getting stingy with their paychecks._

_Blake tried her best not to frown at the thought that Ilia hadn’t seen her parents in over a year. She didn’t want to upset the girl with the notion. Yet she couldn’t help but linger on the thought that they were only fifteen years old, and yet Ilia lived entirely on her own, with only a few friends to fill the empty, decaying house she had grown up in._

_“…A breaking report from the Matsu province has just come in…”_

_Blake’s ears twitched at the smooth voice of the report, underlying what Ilia was telling her. Matsu was a name everyone in that household was familiar with, though none more-so than Ilia._

_“Hold on,” she said._

_She turned her focus towards the projector._

_Smoke and dust billowed over the screen, choking out the surrounding tundra from view. The helicopter which the camera sat in circled like a vulture over a chaotic scene of blazing red firetrucks, and scores of news vans were barricaded away from the mountainside with yellow caution tape. The sunlight refracted off fields of snow in multi-faceted beams of light, shining into the camera lens as though to give the gruesome scene a twisted sense of mysticism._

_**Dust Mine Collapses,** the headline spelled in bright, cerulean letters. **Iron Mountain Mine Workers Trapped From Multiple Cave-Ins.**_

_“Blake.”_

_Ilia’s voice choked off in her throat._

_Blake’s head jerked to the side, her eyes sliding away to look at her friend._

_Her tan skin had faded to a dark, melancholic blue, causing her to blend in further with the shadows at the corners of the living room. The scales on her face and arms were so deeply indigo they were almost black; her eyes, their cerulean so light that her irises appeared nearly white compared to the intensity of her skin, were locked on the projector screen._

_Blake’s heart beat heavily in her chest. Her fingers suddenly felt too cold._

_“My parents—”_

My parents are there, _was what she didn’t say._ My parents work in that mine.

_Blake didn’t realize she had left the couch until her hands were on Ilia’s arms._

_“Come on,” she whispered. She didn’t know where they would go; but wherever it was, it had to be away from the projector. She turned to look over her shoulder at it. Tongues of flame were reaching through the cracks in the boulders and the snow, melting the ice away into thick streams of water which mixed with the soot and oil and mud until it became sludge, pooling at the entrance to the mine._

_“Ilia,” she said. She shook the girl’s shoulders; her arms trembled beneath her hands, shivering strong enough to reverberate into Blake._

_Ilia didn’t move._

_Blake pulled her limp form to her feet, and the girl wavered, sagging into Blake’s chest. She steered the rag-doll in her hold as best she could, shifting the both of them so that Ilia’s back was to the projector, and she faced it fully._

_On the screen, the helicopter continued to circle. Her eyes couldn’t leave the pile of rocks; from a vantage point so high up, they looked like little more than pebbles. If she had been able to, she could have reached through the screen and pick them up herself to clear the entrance for the scores of vans which were rocketing up the lone road which led to the mine. There would be no need for the rescue teams to dig out the tunnels in order to reclaim what little Dust remained, as well as the bodies._

_Tears stained the shoulder of her shirt as she stared over Ilia’s head. Her arms felt numb as they rose to encircle the girl’s shoulders. It was a pitiful attempt at shelter; the reality of what was happening continued to bear down on both of them regardless of what Blake did. The light of the projector in front of her tinged the world blue, as it narrowed to only encompass that singular headline, which continued scroll lazily across the bottom of the screen._

**_Dust Mine Collapses. Iron Mountain Mine Workers Trapped From Multiple Cave-Ins._ **

_The angle of the shot shifted, cutting away from the helicopter. A human reporter stood before a camera, set a safe distance away from the rubble at her back. Teams of workers milled over the wreckage, while the snowflake emblems on the backs of their vests glittered underneath the cold Atlas sun._

_A small screen overlaid over the carnage; within its confines, a tall and pale man stood behind a dark podium emblazoned with a raised metal insignia of the same twelve-pointed snowflake which marked the workers' backs. His ivory hair and mustache were as crisply styled as the white suit he wore, while his blue eyes darted around the cameras flashing with blinding lights across his face._

_At his side, a girl stood. She was young, surely no older than Blake herself._

_She shared the man's features, but not his demeanor. Where the man smiled for the cameras and nodded along with the questions being asked of him, the girl stood stoically. Her dead eyes stared out in front of her with unblinking focus. Her white hair was situated perfectly atop the crown of her head, draping down her back in a thin ponytail._

_“So far, representatives from the Schnee Dust Company have told news outlets the cave-ins were started from a worker mishandling agitated Dust crystals. The explosion triggered a chain reaction throughout the mine system…”_

_Fingers, with skin flashing between dizzying arrays of colors, blue to green to orange to pitch black, clawed into her shoulders as if they were trying to burrow into her bones. She felt them pull her down, dragging her to her knees onto the hard floorboards. She went willingly, and sobs which were muffled against the skin of her neck were the only sound she could hear beneath the rush of her own blood._

_“There are currently no reported survivors. We will be following this story as it develops…”_

..:|:..

Blake rose to awareness slowly, sensations from her subconscious intermingling with reality. The remnants of the dream—memory?—stubbornly clung to her, following her out of sleep. She could still hear the sobs, as if they echoed towards her from a great distance. 

She wanted to shuffle further into the mattress, and return to happier dreams. Ones where tears didn’t stain her skin and cries wouldn't echo in her ears. She burrowed into the blankets, drawing them tight around her as she went.

But then her eyes slid open. 

She had made a promise for today, something which she needed to keep one way or another.

With a sigh, she cast the blankets away from her, and shivered against the cold air which greeted her exposed skin. She stretched out, reaching up towards the lamp at her bedside, and tugged on the chain which allowed the light to illuminate the deep red walls. She stared at the picture-frame which faced her, and a small frown grew on her lips.

The rest of the previous day had been filled with an undercurrent of tension. Ruby had clearly been troubled by what Blake had said on the drive away from Mantle; she didn’t fault the girl for it, but the shadowed looks that had been shot in her direction throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening had still weighed on Blake all the same.

Yang and Tai had been able to sense something was off, as well. Blake knew part of that was due to her reaction once she and Ruby entered the house. She had, after all, been the one they had questioned about the trip. She had been the one to curtly say it had gone fine, before retreating to her borrowed bedroom. 

She just didn’t know how she could explain to them the conflict she felt over being so close to a member of the Schnee family, without giving away the other secrets she wanted to maintain.

So she kept her distance. 

And now it was the next day. She would be returning to her apartment to perpetuate the facade of the roach infestation for her coworkers’ sakes. There, she would have an _interesting_ conversation with yet another person she didn’t really want to see.

She rolled onto her back, and threw her arm over her eyes. 

Couldn’t she just stay in bed and never leave?

The answer, of course, was no. But now more than ever, she wished it could be yes.

She sat up in jerky movements, and stretched out her back before rising to her feet. She reached for her Scroll on the bedside table, and made a brief note that it was barely 6 in the morning, before going to the bathroom across the darkened hall to go through her morning routine. Once she had finished with that, she changed into an old, oversized black shirt, and jeans. She then made sure her bow remained secure over her ears, studying her reflection in the mirror until every angle was hidden, and then went into the kitchen. 

No-one would be up at this time of the morning, she figured. She rounded the corner, intent on poking through the pantry in the hopes of finding an energy bar she could snatch without anyone noticing. Yet, once she had passed through the entryway, she saw Tai sat at the dining table across the second arch in front of her. 

She blinked in surprise, though he didn’t seem to share in her shock as he gestured in front of him. Set before his arm was a mug from which steam rose in lazy tendrils; an identical mug was also placed at the position of the table which she had occupied the last couple of days.

Blake walked over slowly, and peered down into the mug’s contents. A dark liquid greeted her, and she looked up to meet Tai’s blue eyes as they watched her.

“I hope you like black tea,” he said. Blake’s ears perked subtly at the word, and she schooled them back into stillness as she sat down at her place. She breathed deep as she lifted the mug to her lips, and the smell of cinnamon wafted through her senses.

“I do. Thank you,” she said, and took a careful sip. She shut her eyes as the warmth flooded through her muscles, and she sank into her chair.

Then she looked up, and noticed Tai was still watching her. “I didn’t expect anyone would be up this early,” she noted, curious. 

Tai took a deep sip from his own tea before he answered. “You’d mentioned your appointment was in the morning, so I figured I’d be here to send you off.” 

She didn’t know what to say to that. She turned her eyes towards the drink in her hands, and watched her reflection distort in the ripples. 

They sat in silence for a few minutes, carefully drinking from their teas, and Blake eventually pulled her scroll out of her pants pocket to swipe through random applications in the interest of appearing busy. 

Eventually, Tai lowered his mug to the table, and it settled onto the wood with a muted thud. Blake glanced up from her screen, while her free hand curled further around her mug.

“Before you go, I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” he said. His gaze was firm as he looked at her, and she lowered her Scroll to her lap as he spoke. “Ruby mentioned you were upset after meeting Weiss.” 

Blake’s shoulders tensed, and she fought not to narrow her eyes as he spoke.

He seemed to realize the thin line he was walking, however, and continued before she had a chance to interrupt. “It’s probably none of my business, but I’d prefer you didn’t leave here in a bad mood if I can help it. I don’t need to know your history with Weiss’s family…but if there’s anything I’m good at, it’s listening, if you’d like to talk about it.” 

He smiled, ever so slightly, once he finished. 

Blake stared at him for a few heartbeats, wondering how best to respond to that offer. 

She wasn’t going to divulge her previous encounters with the Schnee Dust Company and their merchandise. She certainly wasn’t going to tell Tai how she had been part of a group which had already targeted the Schnee family directly, on numerous occasions. She glanced towards her tea, and then took a careful sip. 

“I appreciate that,” she murmured into the mug. She eyed Tai over the rim as he studied her, waiting for how she would continue. 

“I told Ruby yesterday that I’ve known people who have worked for the Schnees’ company. They weren’t treated very well.” 

Her mind conjured images of smoke in her dark drink. She took another swig to erase the sight.

She pushed on, through the memory. “I…was just taken by surprise to meet someone like Weiss in a flower shop, of all places.”

She had nothing further to say than that, and so she finished her drink on a quick movement. She set her mug back on the table in front of her once she was finished, and met Tai’s eyes. She wondered what he was thinking, as he stared at her.

“I’m aware of the SDC’s reputation, as much as they try to suppress it,” Tai started. She tilted her head as he spoke, curious for what he had to say. “I have buddies who were in the Dust business, and got pushed out when the family expanded from the military sector into the public.”

He looked into his own mug for a moment, contemplative. “All I can say is I’ve known Weiss for a few years now. Speaking for myself, I think she’s a good kid.” He chuckled to himself, suddenly, as if he had just remembered something. “She’s still rough around the edges, but you get used to it after awhile.”

Blake wondered how much of that was true. The heiress didn’t seem like the type to be friendly with ‘normal’ people such as Tai.

“How did you meet her?” she asked.

She wondered if Tai had been expecting her question. He smiled at her, almost knowingly, before he took another drink.

“I’d been looking for someone to come in and spruce up the sidewalk outside of Patchwork,” he explained. “Normally, I’d have done it myself, but I just didn’t have the time that year. I wasn’t having any luck finding someone I liked. All my landscaping buddies weren’t able to help out at that time…and then, one day, Ruby walks into the front office.” He crossed his arms over his chest as he spoke, leaning further back into his chair. “And she’s dragging this girl behind her by the arm. The whole time they’re both going back and forth about how Ruby had taken her off the street.” 

Blake was reminded of how Ruby had so easily pulled her during her first day at Patchwork, when she had only been a customer and not an employee. She felt a small stab of pity for Weiss in that moment, before she shook it off.

Tai smiled wistfully. “Ruby tells me the girl had just opened a florist shop nearby. So I ask if she’d be willing to help me out, told her I’d be willing to pay whatever rate she chose. If I’d known at the time I was talking with Weiss Schnee, I probably would’ve asked her what the hell she was doing running a flower store right there. But that came later.

“She agreed to provide some plants, and two weeks later, we had a small garden in front of the shop. The girls hit it off with Weiss from there. Ruby went to work for her, while Yang helped me with the shop. She’s been a family friend ever since.”

Blake remained silent after Tai had finished his story, and after a few moments, she stood out of her chair to put her mug in the kitchen sink. She rinsed it out in silence, though she took her time in deciding when it was sufficiently cleaned before she returned to the dining room.

Tai watched her carefully, as she stood behind her chair.

“Thanks for the tea,” she said. He nodded at her.

“Anytime.”

Blake pulled her Scroll out of her pocket, and saw that the time was coming up on 7 in the morning. 

“I’m going to go get my stuff,” she said. “My appointment’s at 8.”

When she left the room, she could still feel the imprint of Tai’s eyes on her back, even as she collected her duffle bag and its contents far away from his line of sight. She stood for a minute in the center of Ruby’s room, looking around it at the small piles of clutter which dotted the space.

She’d probably have to apologize to her the next time she saw the girl at work, she thought. Whatever her opinions on the Schnees, Ruby didn’t deserve having those mixed feelings taken out on her.

With a sigh, she hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, and then exited the room. She shut the light off as she went, and then the door behind her. Her eyes trailed towards the closed door at the other end of the hallway, where Ruby and Yang were no doubt still asleep.

Part of her wished they were up so she could thank them herself. No matter how the previous day had gone, she still felt she owed them for letting her into their home.

Instead, she walked past the room on silent feet, and returned to the dining room.

Tai had moved to the couch in the living room, and was scrolling through the channels on the projector when she entered the space. He glanced up at her as she moved for the shoe pile, and she shoved her feet into her boots in silence.

“Good luck with the roaches,” Tai said to her. She glanced up at him when he spoke, and he offered her another smile once she met his gaze.

“Thank you again, for letting me stay here,” she said back. She pulled her jacket off of the hook by the front door, and put down her bag in order to shrug it on. “Let me know what I can do to pay you back.”

Tai was already shaking his head. “No need for that,” he dismissed, “it was good having you around.”

Then his head tilted to the side, as though he had heard something quiet. Blake knew that wasn’t the case; she would have heard whatever noise it was long before he would have.

“I know I said it’s none of my business,” he began. “It’s up to you to judge if Weiss still represents what her family has done…but I’ll just ask you to give her a chance, if you’re willing. You’ll probably see her around the shop now and then, since she drops by to visit sometimes. I think you’ll find out she’s not like some of the other people in her family.” 

_“Look, you’ve just gotta believe me. Weiss is way different from the rest of the Schnees.”_

The memory of Ruby’s voice floated underneath her father’s while he spoke. 

“I’ll think about it,” she finally said.

That seemed to be enough to appease Tai. He shrugged in acknowledgement of what she said, and watched as she shouldered her bag once again. She pulled her keys out of her jacket pocket, and then opened the front door.

“See you on Monday,” he said. She turned to look at him, and then nodded. 

“See you then,” she said quietly, and then stepped onto the patio, shutting the door behind her while she went.

..:|:..

She arrived back to her apartment just as the sun was beginning to rise fully over the horizon. The golden light spilled across the tops of the skyscrapers as Blake reentered Atlas City, though the rays wouldn’t touch the streets for many more hours yet.

She returned to find her parking spot still vacant, directly across from her front door. She wondered if the other residents on the street had an unspoken rule about who got which spaces, as she reversed her car along the curb.

Once she stopped, she sat for a moment to stare up towards her bedroom window, where the black curtains still shut out the outside world from her loft. 

She wondered if he was waiting for her, hoping she would be back at any moment. She had, after all, specified she would be back in the morning.

After some time spent staring blankly at her window, she finally removed herself from her car. A bitter breeze immediately stung her skin once she opened her car door, and she winced against its touch. She pocketed her keys quickly, and as she went to shut her door, her eyes landed on the cardboard box in her back seat, which still held her plants. 

She felt rather ridiculous just then, remembering how she had snatched them off of her counter, and her face flamed as she stared at them.

The spirit must have thought she was insane, leaving in such a rush that night and only coming back for her plants, of all things.

Still, she retrieved the box, and then bustled across the street to her front door. She shivered as another breeze rushed down the sidewalk, and blew into the alcove while she unlocked the door. A moment later, she pushed it open, and then stepped inside the entryway.

Though she didn’t need it, she reached out to flick the light switch, and turn on the florescent light which ran along the length of the low ceiling in the hallway. Then, she moved to take her boots off, and padded down towards the living space.

Her backyard was covered in purple shadows, which spilled through the glass doors into the room. Blake moved to turn on the lights which were set in the vaulted ceiling, and crisp white light pushed the morning darkness back towards the outside, where it belonged.

She brought the box over to the corner of the kitchen counter, and one by one she returned the pots back to their places. 

Looking at the petals reminded her of Myrtle Boutique. Of snowflakes and blue eyes. She scowled, and turned to put the box back in its pile along with the rest of its kind.

She looked towards the back deck, taking note of the lack of paranormal presence that she had yet to encounter. She pulled out her Scroll, before setting it on the arm of her couch. 

“I’m back,” she called into the empty space. Her voice was muffled on the carpeted floor, and she turned around to peer up towards the glass barricade of her loft.

Nothing. She wondered if the spirit could even hear her, or if wherever he was hiding meant that he also didn’t know that she had returned. She stood still for a moment, listening for any sign of movement. But nothing came. She went to hang her jacket in the small closet across from the front door, figuring the spirit would make himself known eventually.

When she slid the door open, she was greeted with a face staring at her through the wall.

_Well that’s unnerving,_ she thought. It would seem she had a spirit in her closet, instead of skeletons.

“Uh,” he said in greeting. 

Blake reached for an empty hanger, and placed her jacket on it without a word. 

The man recovered from his surprise, and emerged from the back wall silently. He hovered a few inches off of the floor, and Blake took an instinctive step back as he moved towards her. 

He noticed that small movement, and lowered back to the floor without a word. He kept his eyes trained to his feet, and Blake followed his gaze for a moment to take note of the blue hue that emanated off of his skin. 

Then she looked towards his face. His cheeks were tinged, not with blue, but a slight pink that she could see underneath the glow.

_Interesting_.

“Come on,” she said, and turned on her heel. She walked towards the living room, not bothering to check over her shoulder to see if he would listen to her.

Blake settled into the lone blue couch set in the corner of the room, smoothing her hands over her lap as she went. Finally, she looked towards the direction of the hallway, and she kept her eyes trained on the man as he followed her lead.

He came to a halt at the arm of her seat. His brow furrowed as they stared at each other, and he seemed to twitch forward. For a moment she thought he was going to move towards the open seat beside her…but then he lurched to the side, and instead moved to sit cross-legged on the empty floor in front of her.

They stared at each other for a few moments, locked at an impasse in silent anticipation. She felt her shoulders tense further with every heartbeat that passed. His tail curled across his legs, the length of it enough for it to curl loosely around the opposite ankle.

He refused to look away from her, she noticed. He kept his gaze fixed on her. Tracking her. As if he were transfixed by her presence.

Blake’s ears twitched, minutely, at that idle thought.

_“I…didn’t know what to do when you came here, so I hid. It's been so long since anyone was here…”_

How long _was_ that, she mused? She continued to hold his gaze as she pondered that question, and all the ones which followed it. Why was his first instinct to hide from her, and to watch her from afar? Why had she never noticed him? 

Why did he reveal himself to her when he did, crouched in front of her bathroom door?

His eyes were still on her. Waiting for her to make the first move. The weight of his attention was growing stifling.

She finally released her breath in a harsh sigh, and her shoulders fell along with the air which left her lungs. She shut her eyes to break away from the intensity in the man’s eyes, if only for a moment.

When she opened them again, he hadn’t moved from his position on the floor. 

“I guess we’ll start with the basics,” she finally said. “What’s your name?”

He twitched at the sound of her voice, and straightened his back to sit taller in his place. His tail uncurled from his ankle, only to be replaced by his fingers a moment after. She watched, passively, as his jaw worked while he thought of what to say.

“My name’s Sun,” he finally introduced. He pointed at his face with his free hand, as if it weren’t already evident. He seemed to realize this blunder, when he brought it behind his head shortly after, a sheepish grin wavering over his face.

_Sun_ , she repeated in her mind. 

It suited him well, she thought. As she studied him, she became more sure of that. She had only heard him say a few sentences so far, but he already appeared to be energetic. He was far more emotive than she could ever imagine being; a trait she didn’t envy, when she watched the smile fall from his lips and be replaced with a furrow between his eyebrows. His arm lowered from the back of his head to fall flat into his lap, resting in front of his tail.

She wondered if he was someone she would have known. The Fang weren’t prominent in Atlas City, at least according to the last she knew of their movements, but they did have a few remote cells operating in the area which she was aware of. “Last name?” she probed, hoping to get an answer for her curiosity.

The man shrugged, at that. His fingers seemed to tighten around his ankle. “I…kind of don’t remember?” he said, his voice rising into a questioning tone as he finished. 

She blinked, as she registered what he had said.

“You don’t remember,” she repeated, her tone flat. It was an awfully convenient thing to just forget. 

Sun shrugged once again.

“I know I had one,” he said. He glanced towards his bare feet, finally breaking away from looking at her. Leaving her to be the one to stare ceaselessly at him, instead. “I just can’t remember it.”

Blake shifted in her seat, crossing her legs while she observed him.

That set off a few alarm bells in her mind. She didn’t quite get the sense that he was lying; in fact, as she watched him struggle not to squirm underneath her stare, she figured he was probably a fairly bad liar. However, she didn’t like that there was information which she didn’t know about.

She set it aside for another time, however. She had more she wanted to know.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“Ah…” Sun shrugged, and glanced towards the floor at his side. “Three years, I think?”

Three years, spent in this tiny place. Blake tried her best not to react to that thought, though her fingers tightened on her knees. 

She wasn’t sure how long the apartment had been empty before she had moved in; though, given that there had been no furniture when she had first arrived, she hazarded a guess to think that it had been some time before anyone had lived there before her. 

“Ghosts can’t leave the place where they died…” she murmured. She had learned that, among other things, through experience over the years. Regardless of whether she had wanted to or not.

Sun glanced up at her when she spoke. She flinched when he did so; she hadn’t meant to say that thought aloud. 

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean…when I try, there’s some kind of barrier that I disappear through. Kinda like my hand gets chopped off, or something.”

Blake watched as he waved his arm in front of him, as if to demonstrate the effect. She stared at him for a few moments, wondering what it must feel like, to be like him.

“So…what’s your name?” Sun finally asked. Blake’s eyebrow quirked at the question.

“You don’t know?” she asked. She wouldn’t put it past him to have found out through any number of ways. She did tend to leave her papers lying around.

Sun scratched at the back of his head, and smiled sheepishly. “I did tell ya I stayed away whenever you were around. I didn’t want to intrude.”

Blake had never met a _polite_ spirit like this before. Her brow furrowed as she looked at him.

“Blake,” she answered. 

Sun’s smile grew, lighting up his features as it went, and Blake urged her heart not to flutter at the sight of it. He seemed too eager to hang on to her every word, as if every acquiescence she gave him were a gift unto itself. “It’s nice to meet you, Blake!” 

Her gaze softened as she looked at him. It had probably been so long since he had been given the chance to speak with anyone like this.

Then, he pointed towards the top of his head. “So…why do you wear the bow? You look better without it.”

Any fluttering her heart may have made ceased as it crashed to a halt.

“Excuse me?” she immediately said, as her eyes narrowed dangerously. Her voice was clipped. “What happened to, ‘I didn’t want to intrude’?”

Sun waved his hands in front of him, panicked. “I didn’t! But…remember when you first saw me? You weren’t wearing it. I was kinda surprised, I swear I didn’t know you were a Faunus before then.”

Blake remembered screaming at him as she clutched her bath towel around herself, the way the water in her hair trickled down her skin. 

“I don’t want to answer that right now,” she said, curtly. Sun’s hands lowered from in front of him, and she watched as he tried not to frown. He wasn’t succeeding. His tail swept across his lap as he looked at her.

She struggled to think of what to say next. Speaking with the dead was surprisingly difficult, for her. Especially when he wanted to bring up such a sensitive subject, for her. But what else was she supposed to ask him about? The weather? She could barely make small talk with the living, let alone someone like him.

“Why did you show yourself when you did?” she finally asked.

Sun blinked, taking a moment to register that she was addressing him. 

“I…guess I got tired of hiding,” he said. “I didn’t know you could see me. No-one else has been able to. So I figured, if you couldn’t see me, I’d just hang around. Not, like, following you or anything. But that closet is kind of cramped, and it gets boring.”

Blake leaned back as she listened to him explain himself.

“And you weren’t surprised when I could see you?” she continued.

He was quick to answer. “I definitely was. But I was so surprised that you were talking to me that I forgot about it. I was just glad I was able to talk to someone at all.” 

Blake watched him as he trailed off, and remained silent while he looked at her. His jaw was squared firmly, though he still found a way to maintain a small smile as he looked at her. Hope flickered to lighten up the gray in his eyes.

Her gaze lowered to her feet.

“Ghosts…are a problem for me.”

Blake didn’t look at Sun when she spoke. She didn’t want to see whatever emotion would cross his face.

“Whenever a ghost has found out that I’m able to see them, they’ve always wanted me to help them somehow. Whether it was bringing their family to them, or staying to keep them company…they always hang onto me.”

**_“Don’t go…”_ **

She flinched against the whisper, and pressed on. “And they’ve always turned on me when I can’t do what they want.” 

Her eyes flicked up, and finally met Sun’s.

“It’s been easier for me to just ignore them and go about my life like I can’t see them. There’s so many out there that it’s second-nature for me to not pay attention to them.”

_To not pay attention to you_ , she thought.

“When you showed up, I had no idea you had been here. I’d thought I was alone here for two weeks, and your presence took me off guard.”

Sun’s expression was stony, and his eyes just as cold, like pieces of flint glinting underneath the ends of his blond hair. He had risen to his feet while she talked, and he towered over her while she remained on the couch. She looked away again, unable to look him in the eye as she voiced the decision she had been considering for the last couple of days.

“I’m thinking of putting this place on the market next week. It’s…nothing against you, personally, but…”

_But I don’t want to have to walk away from a spirit who knows me again_ , she finished, silently.

Her heartbeat echoed dully in her ears while she studied the carpet at her feet. 

It didn’t matter if he accepted her decision…but she hoped he would understand, nonetheless. He seemed terribly lonely, to her. But the lonely spirits were always the worst for her to deal with, the ones who demanded the most from her. She wouldn’t be able to withstand that in her own home. 

“I don’t remember a whole lot from when I lived here…but I know this is a place someone got for me.”

Blake twitched at his voice, and in a jolt, her gaze lifted to look at Sun.

He wasn’t looking at her; his gaze was fixed at a point somewhere at the foot of the couch, while his hands hung loosely at his sides. His eyes were shadowed, haunted.

“I don’t think I had any family. I lived on my own, and I remember that was really hard for me. I had wanted to find someone to move in with me, but…”

He waved one of his hands in the air, hopeless.

“Then this happened.”

Blake frowned while his arm fell listlessly back at his side.

“I wasn’t really surprised at it. Maybe it’s because I’d already been alone, but I got used to being dead pretty fast. All my stuff got moved out of here…and then I was by myself.” His head turned towards the glass doors leading to the deck, and his eyes shifted to look out across the small backyard. “I figured it’d be better if I didn’t hang around. So I tried to move on, I guess? But…I realized I didn’t want to go.”

He turned his attention back to Blake, and her heart clenched, painful and fast. The shadows in his eyes had become clouds, heavy and looming as they threatened to spill over, and tinged in the ever-present blue which clung to someone like him.

“I dunno if you saw the other day, but there’s some stray cats that like to come by the back door. They’re all the company I’ve had this whole time, but they can’t see me either. And no-one has shown up since I died. I wanted so badly for someone to come back, just so I could see another person before I left…so I stayed. And then one day, you showed up, and I heard you’d leased the apartment…”

His hands clenched at his sides. “I didn’t want to intrude on you, so I hid whenever you were home. I didn’t know what to do with you being around. But just knowing there was someone here was enough for me. It made me feel less alone.

“And I told myself that once you leave, I’ll go too.”

Blake’s eyes widened, but she kept herself silent. Sun’s gaze hardened further as they looked at each other, and her fingers tightened over her knees.

“I meant what I said before,” he continued. “All I’m asking is that you don’t leave because of me. I’m not gonna beg you to stay, or to do something else for me…I can’t even remember if there’s anything I could ask like what those other ghosts have, but I know it’s not fair to do that to you.” 

Sun’s gaze moved back towards the floor. “Whenever you want to leave, that’s fine. Just please don’t go because I’m here.”

And then he went silent.

Blake’s eyes were fixated on him. She couldn’t look away from the lonely beacon he made, standing before her with his blue glow which distinguished him as something other than living. His tail hung limp at his back, and she watched as the tip of it twitched from behind his calf. One of her ears mirrored the movement reflexively, and her gaze trailed up the length of his body to focus again on his features. The frown she found there seemed so out of place on his face, as though something like that wasn’t supposed to be present on him.

As she looked at him, she wondered how likely it was for her to be able to put her apartment back on sale so soon after she had gotten it. And the longer she stared at his desolate expression, the more she realized…it wouldn’t be possible.

There was no way she would get out of her lease so quickly. She could move out all she pleased, and live out of her car if she was that desperate to escape, but the last thing she wanted to do was to be paying for a place to stay, one in which she refused to live.

The fact that she had made such an empty threat…it was really just for show. A fantasy to comfort herself with.

There would be no running for her any time soon.

She breathed deep, and released a heavy breath once she accepted that reality.

“…I won’t be moving out yet.”

Sun twitched at the sound of her voice. His fists tightened at his sides, but his gaze snapped up from the floor to meet hers. 

She wanted to look away from the hope in his eyes. It was painful to see. But she forced herself to look at him. She may have learned how to avoid looking at spirits, but despite that, she felt that she owed Sun better than what she had given to the others she had encountered all her life. She'd already gone this far in breaking her own rule.

“But I need some time to get used to this.” Blake crossed her arms, and shut her eyes as she wondered what to say next. 

“I can stay away for a bit if you need time to yourself,” Sun offered. She tilted her head to observe him, and to take in the sincerity of his proposal.

“That…would be helpful,” she said, slowly. “It’s been a long couple of days.”

She still had to sort through the mess of what had happened at the flower shop, and to figure out where she stood on whether or not she should warn Weiss about the potential danger she was putting herself in. She’d rather do that while pretending she was alone, instead of having a spirit like Sun hovering over her shoulder.

Sun nodded once she finished. “I can do that,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you need!”

He turned on his heel, and began to march towards the closet at the end of the hallway.

Blake blinked as she watched his retreating back.

“Wait,” she called out. She rose to her feet, keeping her arms crossed as she turned to face him. His tail twitched at his back, and he turned quickly to face her, with a questioning look on his features.

Her eyes darted over him as she weighed whether or not to propose what she was thinking. 

“You don’t have to go back there,” she said. She nodded towards the closet at his back. “You can go anywhere you like, just as long as it isn’t around me, for now. If I’m in the kitchen…go to the loft, or something.”

Then, she glanced towards the silent projector on the table across from her couch. “I can turn the projector on, if you want to watch a show. I think I’m going to go read for a bit.”

Sun’s mouth fell into a soft 'o' as he looked at her.

His eyes were clear as he stared at her, no longer clouded with the despair he had worn so easily before. She wondered how long he had felt only that crushing loneliness. If it mirrored what she had felt, in her year on the run, and even in the years before that. She was familiar with that sort of despondency he had shown. It cut deeper than she was willing admit, to see it reflected in the way his hands tightened into those fists.

Then a smile grew once again over his face, like the sun rising above the clouds. He nodded eagerly, and waited until she had moved in the direction of the staircase to dart towards the couch. She didn’t miss his tail swishing at his back with enough energy to match his expression.

She pressed a button on the side of the small black box, and watched as the blue light sprang into existence to form the holographic screen from the lens situated underneath it. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as he sprawled out across the cushions, before she returned her attention to the screen. She wasn’t entirely sure what he would be interested in watching; she changed the channel to something which seemed to be playing re-runs of rom-coms that she had vaguely heard of.

Once that was settled, she moved for the staircase, and hesitated with her hand resting on the bannister. She could sense his eyes on her, now that she was aware of his presence. She sighed, and then continued towards the loft. 

It was turning out to be an interesting year, she thought. Whether that was a good thing or not remained to be seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My god they were roommates...
> 
> I'm sticking extremely close to the way certain events played out in the manga, but that's going to change pretty soon. The stuff with the other girls is taking a lot more precedence than I initially anticipated. But now that Blake and Sun are past this initial hurdle, he'll be more prominent than he has been thus far. 
> 
> See you next time!


	4. Chapter 4

_She stood under an amber sky, streaked through with broad strokes of salmon pink and violent red. A disc of blinding white hovered at the narrow edge where the tops of the buildings dared to touch the horizon. Its judgement was clear as it peered over the silhouetted rooftops._

_Scores of telephone poles were spread out alongside an empty street, standing silent and sentinel, tall and pitch-black against the backdrop. Like needles rising out of the earth, to pierce the vulnerable, pink underbelly of the clouds._

_Her back was pressed to the rotting wood, with her hair tangled in the splinters and dull edges. Her ears fought to press against her skull beneath a fine silk ribbon, a light presence to which they were still unaccustomed to._

_It was the closest she would allow herself to get. This particular spot remained as her proverbial line in the sand, where the grass crunched beneath her shoes and the wind whispered louder than she was used to from underneath the canopy of wires above their heads._

**_“Please don’t go.”_ **

_Blake never wanted to see what awaited her on the other side of the pole. No matter how many times she revisited this war-zone, she refused to cross beyond that imaginary enemy line. The closest she would allow herself was the no-man’s-land she stood within in that moment, where she could look out over an empty neighborhood and pretend she was alone._

_It was better that way. The red in the sky mirrored the red she had seen splashed against the side of the telephone pole, once upon a time. She couldn’t remove it from her memories quite as easily._

**_“You were gone for months last time. I don’t want to be alone again.”_ **

_But that wasn’t possible, was it? She would have to leave eventually. There were things that needed to be done. Pawns to set in place. Dust to settle._

_She voiced that concern aloud._

_The wind rushed to her side. It was a frantic gale, one that tried to push at her shoulders, but didn’t so much as stir her hair._

**_“No. You don’t really have to…you know that.”_ **

_The somber sun was falling beneath the rooftops, haloing the buildings in white light. Her eyes traced its descent, and counted the distant pinpricks of stars emerging from behind the burgeoning orange and pink, which was slowly melting into faint shades of purple. She breathed in slowly, taking in the stale air._

_She had to go. She knew she had a train to catch the next day._

_The wind brushed invisible fingers across her face. She tilted away from its touch._

**_“Are you going to be with him?”_ **

_It was a redundant question. Blake hardly left his side these days. She accompanied him everywhere, acting as a permanent shadow trailing in his wake, staying silent and observant and obedient; just as he liked. Between him and the wind, she could scarcely recall what it was like to be alone anymore._

_She responded truthfully. The wind knew the answer before she gave it, but conversation was so rare to come by._

**_“You’re coming back though, aren’t you? It won’t be as long as before?”_ **

_She always came back. She couldn’t stop herself from being drawn in like a moth to light. To fire. She burnt herself on the flames which still smoldered here because the pain helped her to remember what had been lost. If she left, she would forget it. The wind would always remind her of this, as it stirred restlessly on the other side of the telephone pole._

_Her answer was far more gentle than what she was thinking. Hiding her feelings was the only kindness she could offer now._

**_“Good. Just don’t do anything to upset him.”_ **

_She wanted to say it wasn’t up to her, but she knew that the wind was only offering its own form of sympathy as it told her this. It knew that where she had to go, a different sort of fire raged. And unlike the wind, it was able to leave marks on her skin. She had to be cautious in handling it beneath her fingers. She had already been burnt by the one who wielded it more than once._

_She said she would be careful. She meant it; she always tried to make sure the ever-growing flames and blue embers didn’t singe her. Even still, her caution didn’t always shield her. In the past, though, that didn’t stop her from returning to it._

_She breathed in slowly, feeling the stretch of her lungs as they expanded in a way the wind’s could not. Within that breath, the stars grew brighter, the sky darker. The red was almost gone, just as it had been washed away from the sidewalk._

_There was nothing else for her there. Just the memory she always came back to._

_Her feet led her off of the dead grass. It crumbled to small bits beneath her shoes, before the sound was replaced by the crunch of pebbles on the road. She had almost five hundred cracks in the asphalt to count before she would return to the empty green house._

**_“Blake, please be safe.”_ **

_The wind was faint in her ears while she left it behind._

_She didn’t know then, but she would be back sooner than she had thought._

..:|:..

She awoke to a dark ceiling and still air.

In the quiet, with her hands fisted into the dark sheets, she still felt the breeze on her bare ears as it followed her out of her sleep. She raised a hand to her face, and blearily rubbed at her eyes to clear the haze shadowing them. The wind disappeared into the silence, and she pushed the dream back to the corners of her mind, where it belonged.

Her fingers tightened their hold in the cotton, and she rolled onto her side, curling tighter into herself as she went. The resurgence of these sorts of thoughts was becoming bothersome to her. All that time spent running from her past, only for it to find her in her sleep, where she couldn’t ever escape it? It was unacceptable.

But she also knew the reason why it was happening.

A harsh sigh forced its way up her throat as she sat up, and raised a hand to lift the curtains which blocked the window above her head. From beneath the black fabric, an equally dark sky greeted her. The overcast expanse was punctured by the soft white-blue glows of the holographic street lights which still remained active, even at such an early hour.

She swung her legs over the side of her bed, after enough time spent staring into the night. Her bare feet met with cool carpet, before she placed her hand on the cardboard box which had been crammed against her headboard to serve as a nightstand, and tapped the screen of her Scroll to illuminate the hologram. Her eyes narrowed as the light flared to life, and she eventually registered that it was just after 3 in the morning once she adjusted to the brightness.

She was slow to rise to her feet, with her fingers curling around her Scroll as she went. Her sluggishness was only temporary. A cup of tea would be enough to fully get her to separate from the dregs of slumber.

As she made her way down the staircase, her fingers trailed loosely on the railing. Her ears twitched and swiveled, drawn by a low voice coming from below her. Her eyes fell to the source of it: the small hologram at the base of the stairs which pierced the gloom, and spilled its light out across the lower floor.

Through the clear railing, her sight landed on the couch against the opposite wall, and the figure spread out across both its seats. His white shirt seemed brighter in the dim, while his legs faded into the shadows, only discernible by the glow encasing him. 

When she reached the last few stairs before the landing, Sun’s eyes met hers. 

She was the first to look away, and turned towards the kitchen with not a word of greeting spared to him. It wouldn’t do to linger on the reason her memories were so rudely escaping the confines she had thrown them in.

One week ago, she and Sun had come to their tenuous arrangement. She had yet to approach him with more substantial ground rules. If she were being honest, she wasn’t quite sure how to do it, or what she even expected outside of telling him, “Don’t bother me.”

As such, they had fallen into an unspoken habit. The territorial lines had been drawn, and Sun had remained true to his word. He remained out of her sight, for the most part, preferring to linger on the back deck or the couch. Blake secluded herself to the loft in the time she was home, while also claiming the bathroom as her secondary space. When she was away, she had no concrete idea what he got up to, though it had become another silent agreement for her to leave the projector on so that Sun wouldn’t have to remain in silence while she slept or went to work. 

They had rarely spoken, since the conversation which had preceded this cohabitation. Neither of them had thus far seemed willing to cross the boundaries. She was okay with that, though it wasn’t getting any less odd to witness Sun’s feet disappear through a solid wall whenever she came through the front door, or for his head to peek out at her from within the cushions of her couch.

It was, however, becoming clear to her that despite whatever he had professed the previous week, Sun _did_ want something from her. She had a vague idea of what that something was; the puppy-dog looks he would sport whenever he thought she couldn’t notice were more than enough to tell her that they were reaching the limits of her previous stance.

Another sigh lingered behind her lips as she pulled a box of tea leaves out of the cabinet above her head, and settled it on the counter beside the stove. 

As she went about her morning ritual, she did her best not to look too far over her shoulder. Her drawers rattled as she looked for a clean spoon and cup, and the kettle hummed in her hand as she went to fill it with cold water from the sink, but none of the noise surrounding her movements unsettled her more than the warm weight of attention fixed squarely on a point between her shoulder blades.

Once the kettle was set on the stove-top, she lit the burner underneath it, with a soft click emanating from the knob she had turned. She placed the loose leaves into a small, pyramid-shaped infuser which sat in the awaiting cup, and then leaned against her still unused dining table. She crossed her arms as she stared at the gleaming silver container.

Her ears strained to flick towards where she had last known Sun to be, in search of any signs of movement. However, uncovered as they were, she felt an even stronger need to keep them still than if they had been beneath her ribbon. She made it her goal to not allow them free range as she continued to watch the neck of the kettle in anticipation of the steam emitting from its end.

It wouldn’t have been her first choice, to be so brazen with exposing her ears the way she was. After all, it had been over a year since her ears had been seen by someone other than her. She had grown accustomed to pretending to be a species that she wasn’t in the time that had passed since then. To have someone, even a ghost, know one of the many secrets she was concealing was…unnerving.

But, she hadn’t forgotten the unfortunate reality that Sun had already seen them. She smirked, sardonically, at the kettle. _The cat’s already out of the bag_. 

So she had reasoned, after the conversation they had held a week prior, that there was little point in hiding her ears in the comfort of her own apartment. And thus they remained unbound, whenever she was there.

She didn’t know whether she would ever get used to the feeling of another’s eyes on her ears, or having them be so exposed to the sound of someone’s voice. Still, it helped to ease her discomfort to know that Sun was Faunus, himself.

Her shoulders jolted when a low whine emitted in front of her, and she pushed off of her support to move the kettle off of the stovetop. Its shriek grew louder, and she gingerly took its warm handle in one hand, before moving to hover the kettle over her cup. 

The boiling water hissed and gurgled as she poured it out, and immediately shifted from clear to soft orange once it had submerged the infuser.

Abruptly, she imagined seeing veins of pink and red, and black telephone wires, as she looked into the ripples.

She set the kettle back onto the stovetop with a clang.

After a moment, she took her hand off the kettle’s handle, and her shoulders shuddered as she inhaled.

Once the few minutes necessary to steep her tea had passed, she removed the infuser and placed it in the empty sink, and then finally turned to face the rest of the room which had been at her back.

The holo-projector was playing some sort of sitcom, from what she could discern. Nothing she was too familiar with; but then again, she never had the time or the desire to get invested in trivial shows. Her eyes slid off of it easily, before shifting towards the glass doors across from her. The sun’s light hadn’t yet touched the sky, leaving her backyard to remain blanketed in shadow.

Then, her attention moved further left, towards the couch. 

Sun had moved since she had last observed him, and was now sitting straight-backed and crosslegged in the corner of the seat. 

He seemed to be unusually invested in the show in front of him; his eyes were wide and unblinking, while he stared directly forward. His hands were layered atop his ankles, and she noticed with a small jolt of surprise that his tail was strewn out over the top of the cushions, rather than phased through the blue fabric. 

If she hadn’t known better, she would have figured he was actually sitting there.

As she stared at him, she felt a frown tug at the corners of her lips. 

Even after a week, she still didn’t know what to make of the blond boy who had lived and died in this place. Indecision and discomfort were still very much at the forefront of her mind, serving to keep him at arm’s length despite their shared accommodation. 

Those feelings she had wrestled with all her life weren’t going to be something she was going to get over any time soon. But as she continued to study him, and the way he clearly fought to not flinch under her scrutiny, she felt an unusual, quiet desire to be the one to extend an olive branch.

She crossed out of the kitchen, moving towards the glass doors in silence.

In doing so, she was stepping over the carefully laid borders that she had placed, moving across the lines in the sand she had drawn and redrawn in her twenty-three years of life. She could tell that surprised Sun, from the way he somehow managed to sit even straighter in his seat without putting his attention onto her.

Her fingers tightened around the warm ceramic in her hands, and she prayed she wouldn’t clench it tight enough to shatter, before she turned her head to face him fully.

“Would you like to join me outside?” she asked, quietly.

It was the first time in a week that she would be continuing her habit of sitting on the back deck to wait for the sun to rise.

Sun’s reaction was immediate. He practically leapt off of the sofa, and remained hovering in the air for a second too long to be deemed natural, before his feet fell silently to the carpeted floor. His gray eyes widened enough to look like twin saucers, once he registered what Blake had asked.

Blake almost pitied him, in that moment. No-one should be so eager to just be _spoken_ to.

“Yeah,” Sun said. His voice warbled, as though on the verge of cracking, and he shook his head before repeating his affirmation. “Uh, yeah. Of course.” 

He gestured towards the deck, and she continued on her path undeterred. 

The door slid open silently as she pushed it to the side, and a wall of crisp, cool air caused goosebumps to rise on the parts of her skin which were exposed to the elements once she stepped onto the faded wood. Behind her, she could still discern the light of the projector from inside the apartment while it leaked out to flicker across her back porch. She chose to leave it running, to give herself some level of light in the early morning hours.

Once she was outside, she turned around to wait for Sun to follow her. Her hand was still poised on the glass, ready to pull it further open— 

And then it fell. Another frown graced her expression; though she wasn’t quite sure why, while she stood dumbly in the open air.

After a moment, Sun appeared on the other side of the glass door, standing in front of the one that had not been opened. He peered at her through it, before his dark eyes darted towards the opening that she had left. That was enough cue for her to reach back out and slide it shut. 

When he passed through the junction of the shut doors, a quiet part of her wondered if he felt anything from their presence. 

She didn’t voice the question aloud, electing instead to settle onto the cold wood with her feet pressed into the short, dew-covered grass below. Her toes dug into the earth, and she set her cup down at her side as she leaned forward to rest her arms in her lap.

On her opposite side, Sun moved to resume his customary crosslegged position, settling himself a few paces behind her. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as his tail curled across the black fabric of his sweatpants, and wrapped lightly around his calf. The tawny fur stood out in the morning gloom, mirroring the intensity of his blond hair.

Then, they sat in the stale, cold silence far too long to be considered comfortable.

Blake clasped her fingers together to fight against the chill.

Most mornings, when she would come outside, she would wait until the sun had risen enough to blend the purple hues of dusk into something lighter, and she would be content to wait for hours if she needed to. The quiet peace of the world around her was something she had treasured.

But now, with her unusual guest, she felt like she needed to say something, to alleviate the tension in her shoulders.

She shifted backwards, and pulled her feet away from the cool grass. She crossed her legs once she finished moving, and then reached for her drink beside her. When her attention flitted to the side, part of her hoped Sun had gotten bored of her unsociable nature, and went back inside. 

Instead, her eyes fell downward, towards where portions of his bare feet were phased into the deck. She took a deep sip of her still-scalding tea while Sun pulled them out of the solid surface with jerky motions. When he settled, his feet looked as if they rested fully on the wood once more.

With a quiet sigh breaking past her lips, she turned to fully face him, and leaned forward.

“What is it like?” she asked. She met his gaze as she spoke, peering at him from over the rim of her cup.

Sun shrugged. Though, the nonchalant nature of it seemed forced to her, as she watched the way his jaw tensed under her scrutiny.

“Being like this?” he asked.

Blake nodded.

“Well, I can’t really compare it to anything else,” Sun said. She absently noted how he carefully skirted around the topic of _being dead_. “I guess I still _feel_ real, but…it took awhile to get used to not being able to actually touch anything.”

She didn’t reply to that, choosing to take another drink while a whispering breeze stirred her hair.

“I don’t really know how to describe it, though. It’s like, how do you know what it feels like being alive?”

Blake thought about that, as she stared at his blue-tinged form. 

Some things were obvious. She could hold her cup in her hands, as she was then, and feel the heat of her tea seeping through the ceramic into her fingers. If she were to press her hands to the wall, she wouldn’t move through it like it were an illusion. It would be just as real as she was, and just as immoveable. 

If she concentrated, she could feel her heart beating in her chest, a slow and steady thunder underneath her ribcage. With every breath she drew, her lungs constricted and expanded as they were meant to. 

The wind moved through her hair and the fur of her ears, raindrops weighed down her clothing and dripped off her skin. The world responded to her presence.

Such things were so normal, so…expected. She never thought about the way forces of nature touched her form, and that realization in particular struck her; it had never occurred to her that even the experience of being alive couldn’t always be considered universal.

“I guess I’ve never thought about it.”

Sun smiled once she made the admission, as though he were proud of her for coming to that conclusion.

“Right. It kind of…just _is_ , y’know? Being like this became my new normal.” 

A new normal. But what had his previous normal been like, she wondered?

He had said before that he had lived alone in this apartment. Did he once have morning rituals, like she did? Did he have a job that he had left for every day? What were the things he had considered so mundane and unremarkable, back when being alive had been all that he’d known? 

She took another drink, to stop herself from asking those pressing questions aloud.

“So…um…”

Sun liked to mumble when he didn’t know what to say, she was coming to realize. Despite only having spoken to him for extended periods of time on two occasions,she got the impression that this was an unintentional trait of his. It was like he couldn’t exist in silence; he needed to be doing something, hearing anything, just to fill the void.

Blake supposed that was alright, even if she didn’t understand the desire to fumble over her words so easily. After all, he had been alone for however many years, likely with only himself for company.

"What do you do for work?” Sun finally asked, breaking her out of her reverie.

In the immediate moment, she could only blink in the face of such a mundane question. Following that, part of her wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the topic; a ghost, of all things, was trying to make awkward small talk with her. The kind one would have waiting in a long line, sitting in a doctor’s office, at a first date.

She remained quiet, instead, keeping the small flutter of amusement locked inside her chest.

With her lack of response growing more potent, Sun’s tail began to flick across his lap in uneven beats. 

Her eyes remained on him for a few moments, and she waited out the remainder of his uneasy shifting until he finally returned to a semblance of stillness. She brought her drink up to her lips to take another sip once he had calmed down.

“I work at a car dealership,” she said, with her words muffled into her cup. 

The urge to tell him the truth felt strange on her tongue. There was no reason for her to conceal it; though half-truths and lies were as natural to her as breathing. The fact that she was so willingly relinquishing aspects of herself to him was…unusual.

She firmly reminded herself that there was no harm in telling him what he wanted to know; he had remained in the apartment with her for two weeks without her noticing his presence. He already knew she left for hours at a time every weekday.

“That’s cool. So…do you, uh, work on the cars? Or…auction them?” Sun frowned as he trailed off. His tail flicked out again in a strange series of waves. She watched as he seemed to bite the inside of his lip, drawing the lower portion slightly into the gap of his teeth.

“…I don’t really know what people at car dealerships do,” he finally said, and smiled apologetically once he finished.

In all honesty, Blake didn’t either. She took notes for Tai but she had never been instructed to remember them, and she did only the work she was given. She couldn’t blame Sun for not knowing.

“Right now, I’m just sorting through their paperwork,” she explained. “I don’t know anything about cars, really. But…the owner and his daughters offered me a job to clean up their office, so I’ve been doing that.”

Sun intently nodded along with her explanation, as though he was thoroughly captivated by what she was saying. The movements of his head reminded her of a drinking bird, rising and falling in quick jerks.

“And do they know about…”

He waved a hand above his head, passing his fingers just over the space where her ears occupied her skull—

—Her ears, which pressed flat against her head when her eyes narrowed, minutely, at what he was asking.

“No,” she said flatly. “No-one other than you knows.”

No-one in Atlas City knew about her ears was what she meant, but didn’t say aloud. And she would have liked to keep it that way, at all costs.

She didn’t think Sun understood the motivations for that, given the way his head tilted to the side, and how a single eyebrow arched above his gray eyes a moment later.

“So…you’re hiding?” he asked.

He likely didn’t mean for the question to sound so blunt, but Blake still winced as though it crashed on her like a physical blow.

“You could say that,” she said, before turning her head away from him. She fixed her attention on the lightening sky, and brusquely raised her cup to her lips. This was not a particular subject she wished to lay out for Sun’s perusal, especially given the dreams she had escaped from earlier in the morning.

Thankfully, Sun didn’t push the guarded boundaries surrounding her past, and her intentions, any further.

For some time following that, they remained in a comfortable silence as the morning light began to touch the dark sky. Blake finished her tea with slow movements while the clouds began to burst from within with weak rays of purple and white sunlight.

As the time stretched on, she felt her shoulders loosen, releasing the tension she had carried since she had first woken up, and she rolled them when she realized how much lighter she felt, without the dark memory weighing on her.

Her eyes eventually returned to facing in front of her, when she noticed a fluttering out of the corner of her attention. She looked just in time to watch as Sun finished shifting into another position. 

He had drawn his knees up to his chest, and wrapped his arms loosely around his shins. His tail followed soon after, draping across one of his arms, and he rested his chin in the juncture between his knees while he stared down at his semi-transparent feet.

She wondered if he had moved to make himself more comfortable; if comfort was even a factor for him at all, in the state he was now in. It was never something she had thought to ask a ghost before.

He looked…content. His dark gray eyes seemed lighter despite the gloom. A barely perceptible smile turned one corner of his lips slightly higher, while he stared at a portion of the deck somewhere beside her thigh.

“You don’t need to stay out of my way anymore,” she said, her voice pitched barely loud enough to not be considered a whisper.

Sun’s eyes darted away from his feet to meet her gaze. She didn’t allow her expression to shift at the confusion which slowly spread across his face like a stain.

“If you want to be around me when I’m home, that’s fine. Just don’t follow me around, and stay out of the bathroom when I’m in there.”

Sun continued to stare at her for so long she feared he may not have understood what she had said.

Her lips parted to repeat herself when he finally shook his head.

“Not that I’m going to say no to that, because I won’t! But, um…what made you change your mind?” Sun asked.

She could have said it was the thought of no longer being willing to make him linger alone in a place where another person now lived. She could have harkened back to his description of his new normal, and how much lonelier it must have been when he had once been as vibrant and alive and _real_ as anyone else in the world. She could have described the way she felt his eyes linger like a brand on her whenever she entered the apartment and ignored his presence in the still air.

She could have told him about the telephone pole in her dreams, and the wind which had whispered quiet pleas into her ears.

She didn’t do any of those things.

“If we’re going to live together for the next year, I have to get used to you being around,” she said. Her voice took on a harder tone than before, though she felt her heart drop minutely when Sun’s expression fell out of the excitement it had been revealing. She turned her attention to the contents of her cup, where the remains of her tea sat at the bottom in a minuscule puddle. “We may as well start that now.”

It was incredibly quick thinking, on her part. If she didn’t know any better, it almost sounded like that had been her reasoning the entire time. She would have congratulated herself for it, if she had planned to make that decision as quickly as she had.

Sun remained quiet once she had finished; but it wasn’t the peaceful, comfortable presence that had overtaken them in the many minutes that they had occupied together, before. She felt her cheeks burn as she stubbornly hid away those unspoken reasons back into her mind, where they wouldn’t be able to bother her any further.

“I’m going to get ready for work,” she eventually announced, before rising to her feet. She kept her now-cold cup clenched tight in her hand while Sun remained sat on the deck, and his head tilted higher to keep his attention on her as she went. She turned towards the glass doors, intent on leaving with no further words spoken.

Her eyes landed on the shifting light of the projector on the other side of the glass, and she felt an unbidden thought bubble up her throat before she had a chance to stop it in its tracks.

“Is there anything different you want me to put on the projector?” she asked, and made sure to soften her voice this time, before she turned back to face Sun.

He still hadn’t moved from his seat on the deck, though his dark eyes remained on her all the same. They glinted slightly, in the weak morning light; it was a trait inherent in all Faunus. She found it strange that it still occurred even in his death.

He remained quiet for a moment as he thought about what to say.

“I’m okay with what you’ve put on for me so far,” he finally said, and he smiled as he spoke. “Honestly, anything is better than nothing. But…”

Blake stayed silent as she watched the smile fade from his lips, and his eyes went unfocused as he stared at a point somewhere over her shoulder.

“I think…I liked sports, before? I don’t remember what game, though.”

That didn’t seem to bother him as much as she thought it should have.

Still, she nodded once he finished, and slid the glass door back open with no further words spoken between them. Once she had closed it behind her, she moved to put her cup in the empty sink, and then went towards the stairs with the intent to collect her clothes for the day from the shelf above her bed.

As she passed the projector, she paused to pick up the remote. Quickly, she flipped through the minuscule amount of channels she had available to her until she reached one which seemed dedicated to sports commentary.

She went upstairs before she could let herself think on what that small action meant, in the grand scheme of things.

..:|:..

Blake took her time in returning home, that evening.

She told herself, as she aimlessly drove throughout the streets of Mantle, that she was only trying to find a grocery store closer to her workplace, and other similar amenities in the hopes of familiarizing herself with the city. 

It most certainly wasn’t because she thought she saw gray eyes looking back at her in the rearview mirror, whenever her eyes darted towards the streak-filled glass.

She had been partially in a daze the whole day, something which her coworkers had picked up on fairly quickly. It had been something that had grated on her nerves, particularly when Yang and her father had insisted they sit at the same table as her during her lunch break, despite her protests that she wanted to be alone for the hour she had allotted for her chance to read a book she had taken from her paltry collection in the apartment.

Even if she had been left in silence to concentrate on her book, however, she knew it wouldn’t have been possible. For the entire day, she just couldn’t get Sun out of her head; no matter what she did, whom she spoke with, where she was. Despite being confined to the boundaries of the apartment, he was everywhere she went.

What did it mean for her, when a ghost didn’t stay where they were supposed to?

And so she drove onward, passing numerous neon signs beckoning her to the various family-owned shops and small chain stores dotted around the robust cityscape as she went. She also passed countless shadows on the sidewalks, their blue-tinged forms intermingling with the pedestrian traffic of Mantle residents making their way to their various destinations throughout the city.

The weather that day had quickly become overcast, once she had arrived for work; it was looking likely rain would be coming to flood the city streets once again, with the dark slate clouds that hung low enough on the horizon to brush the tops of Atlas City’s monumental skyscrapers. She scowled out of her windshield when her attention darted once again to scan the sky, and were met with the color of Sun’s eyes staring back at her.

She had to go back eventually, and the longer she wandered the quickly emptying roads, the darker the world became. The electric streetlights flared to life in small orange sparks, and buzzed above her head as she drove underneath their thin metal arms.

Her eyes narrowed as she drove slowly down a side street. She carefully stayed away from the lines of cars parked haphazardly on the curbside, and she stared out towards the surrounding brick facades. 

The street felt…vaguely familiar.

She found out the reason why when her attention darted to the street corner, still several yards away from her. Even in the dying evening light, a pair of purple and orange chairs gleamed like beacons on the sidewalk.

As Blake drew closer, she realized that the lights inside Myrtle Boutique were on, sending golden light out to illuminate the sidewalk and the street through its massive display windows.

Before she realized what she was doing, she pulled her car off to the opposite side of the road, and parked in one of the few open spots left along the curbside across the street from the flower shop.

Her fingers drummed lazily against the leather steering wheel while she tried to parse out her reason for stopping here. Her head turned to the side to stare out of the passenger side window. From where her car idled, she had a clear line of sight into Myrtle Boutique’s spotless window.

While she peered past the numerous bouquets and arraignments which pressed eagerly against the glass, her eyes searched for any sign of a small blur of black and red darting within the building.

That was when she realized Ruby hadn’t come to Patchwork.

Her heart stuttered at that thought, and the reminder that they had departed on awkward terms the previous day.

Part of her still stung at the stalwart defense Ruby had thrown up in support of Weiss Schnee, and that part of her raged against the notion of that woman being so closely connected to a group of people she was slowly coming to consider to be…not friends, per-say; _acquaintances_ may have been a better word. It was more impersonal than friendship, but something in higher regard than coworkers. Certainly leagues beyond anything she could ever see herself thinking someone like Weiss to be.

She knew it wasn’t Ruby’s fault. The girl wasn’t singularly responsible for the suffering of millions of lives, and certainly not in the way the Schnee family was. Without the knowledge of Blake’s past to provide her with much-needed context, how was Ruby supposed to understand the strife and anguish Blake felt?

That small part of her that scorned Ruby’s friendship with the heiress of the SDC sneered a quiet thought, that Ruby had the luxury of ignoring the injustices the corporation had levied against Blake’s people. The thought went further, while her eyes continued to search within the flower shop, citing a well-worn belief that it wasn’t Blake’s responsibility to explain to Ruby the abuse that had been wrought towards her people.

Perhaps that was true. No, more than that; it _was_ true. No-one had an excuse when it came to staying ignorant to what the SDC did to those it 'employed'.

But it didn’t mean she had to take out her anger for Weiss and her family on Ruby. Not when the girl didn’t seem to _know_ the truth of what the Schnees were.

Eventually, she caught sight of her fixation, and her train of thought stopped in its tracks.

Further into the flower shop, Ruby appeared out of the doorway set on the opposite wall, with only her face and torso visible before the rest of her was hidden by the store’s front counter.

A moment later, Weiss followed in her path. The two seemed fully engaged in conversation, gesturing towards one another and going about their tasks with practiced ease. As though they were familiar with one another’s presence. 

The longer Blake watched them, the scorching vestiges of anger slowly began to fade into a quiet, thrumming confusion.

Ruby seemed just as energetic as ever, and was playfully swatting at Weiss with a handful of colorful flowers wrapped in thick plastic sheets. It was something that wasn’t out of character for the young woman, an action that was innocent enough and clearly meant to inspire some sort of equal reaction.

The child-like banter Blake witnessed from Ruby wasn’t what was confusing her.

What was unusual, in Blake’s eyes, was the exasperated smile on Weiss’s lips.

Even at the distance Blake remained from the pair, the sight of such a thing was still easy enough for her to recognize. It seemed so…out of place, when she compared the upward tilt of the woman’s mouth with her memories of a stoic teenager on a holographic screen.

The scar crossing across Weiss’s eye was barely discernible, but Blake still could picture the small silver line with ease while she watched the woman bat at the bouquet Ruby was continuing to pester her with.

As she flipped through the vast expanse of her memories, she couldn’t recall evidence of such a wound in the years she had spent watching Weiss on SDC broadcasts and interviews, just as she wasn’t able to match the barely concealed mirth which crossed her expression with the blank stare the girl she had once been would give to the cameras.

Ruby eventually gave up on whatever she was trying to accomplish with her teasing, and set the bouquet down on the cluttered countertop. Blake watched as she bent down behind the counter, and pulled out a battered black backpack from the cover of the surface. She stood still as she slung the bag across her shoulder, and said a few words towards Weiss, who nodded quickly.

Blake’s brow furrowed as she continued to observe the exchange.

Nothing she saw changed her mind on Weiss.

But it certainly made her wonder, once again, the same thought that had occurred to her the previous day.

Why was she in Mantle, instead of staying within the security of her family’s ill-gained fortune?

She didn’t get a chance to linger on the thought, as she took notice of Ruby making her way towards the boutique’s front door, which was closed to the outside world this time.

By the time the girl had opened the door and stepped out into the cold spring evening, Blake had already left her parking spot, and turned the corner of the street in silence.

Later, as she wandered through one of the many grocery stores she had spotted on her drive throughout Mantle, she came across the baked goods section. It was set into the back corner of the shop, devoid of shoppers; the small alcove on the back wall where the bakery was divided from the shop floor by an empty glass display case was dark, and absent of any employees. 

The dim orange lights hummed loudly while Blake stared, with a confused blankness in her eyes, at the numerous shelves of things which were far too sweet for her liking.

Spread out before her were dozens of plastic containers, filled to the brim with various large, slightly oblong cookies, donuts which shimmered underneath thick layers of frosting and glaze, and other similar treats. The smell of sugar permeated the air she stood in; it was enough to set her teeth on edge, as she stood alone in the middle of the narrow aisle.

Her thin basket was already filled with everything she needed to sustain herself for the next couple of weeks, but nonetheless her hand soon reached out to take hold of a small, clear box that rested atop a stack of similar containers.

The yellow sticker plastered onto the lid of the box indicated that the half dozen chocolate chip cookies she held were on sale, likely due to their quickly approaching expiration date.

She placed it into her basket with no further thought given to the dessert, other than the hope that Ruby would accept them as her own form of silent apology.

..:|:..

A little over an hour passed before she finally returned back to her apartment.

By that time, dusk had fully settled, leaving Blake’s street to be lit up by the graces of the holographic streetlights which had come to life sometime in the early evening hours.

She pulled her bags of groceries out of her car, and balanced them carefully in her arms while she quickly crossed the street to her front door. She struggled to pull her keys out of her pocket without dropping any of her cargo, before she gently kicked the door open and entered the hallway.

Immediately, she could hear the quiet thrum of a voice in the living room, its lilt similar to the drawl of newscasters and reporters while whoever was speaking continued on with whatever they were discussing. She kicked off her boots, and shifted her bags to rest precariously on her hip while she hung her keys on the rack beside the front door, before she shut it behind her.

The speaking grew louder as she walked down the hallway towards the living space, and eventually she discerned that the voice belonged to a man commentating on various statistics for…some sports team. Blake wasn’t familiar with the game, or the player the man was enthusiastically rambling on about. She quickly tuned the voice out.

Her eyes then fell on the empty blue sofa before she looked out towards the back porch.

No blue glow shimmered from beyond the glass, where the lack of light was reminiscent of the morning she had spent outside.

She turned towards her dining table, and set her bags down on the empty surface with a small huff.

Then, she turned back to face the empty room.

“I’m back,” she called out.

The notion of announcing her presence to a spirit was just as unnerving to her as the first time she had done it, little over a week prior. Even despite that clenching in her chest, however, part of her wanted to be certain she had left Sun in the apartment. That only the memory of him had followed her across the city that day.

She didn’t have to wait long before that increasingly familiar cerulean light flickered at the corner of her eye.

She turned to face Sun just as he phased through the glass railing of the stairwell, having been standing only a few steps away from the landing of the loft space. 

The smile on his face could have lit up the dim room on its own.

“Welcome back,” he said, just as his feet touched lightly to the floor.

Blake turned towards her bags of groceries once he spoke, and began to sift through the blue plastic. She took out the box of cookies first, and set them on the counter between the refrigerator and the sink.

As she went about her task of putting her food away, her attention kept shifting towards the presence which lingered beside her.

Occasionally, he would ask her about the particular product she held, and would lean close to read the labels of the off-brand food and frozen vegetables she held; she got the impression, the more she talked with him, that he either didn’t remember what it was like to cook, or had never really done so for himself when he had been alive.

Though he didn’t need to, he would move out of her way whenever she approached a drawer or shelf that he stood in front of. But he always remained in her line of sight, and continued to ask her questions and listen to her quiet answers while she went about the routine task of putting groceries away, as though it were something more entertaining and engaging than the sports program droning away in the background of their conversation.

“So, how was work?” Sun eventually asked.

Her eyes darted towards him, and took in the way he leaned against the countertop with his arms folded over his chest. His legs were similarly crossed over one another, making it look like he really was standing and resting against the surface at his back.

He looked like he belonged there, standing in the place where she had previously drawn her invisible boundaries separating him from what she had claimed as her space to exist without his presence lingering over her shoulder.

When her lips parted to begin recounting the events of her day to him, it felt just as natural as breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a filler chapter this time around, but I hope it provided a little bit of levity to Blake and Sun’s dynamic. I’m having a lot of fun tossing in little references and easter eggs to canon, so let me know if you manage to find any of them!


	5. Chapter 5

For someone whose name was synonymous with ‘light’, Sun existed in a world of perpetual shadow. 

He remembered the first few days as being the hardest to endure, shortly after he had watched his body be carried away underneath the shield of a blank white sheet. That had been when he had still been blessed to have his apartment still filled with his belongings. 

At that time, he could pretend to lay in his own bed, or to sit on his couch and stare out the glass doors to the outside world, or to lay his hands over his numerous books as though he could hold their battered pages, so long as he kept his fingers just far enough away from their spines that he wouldn’t phase through them. 

That had been disconcerting to realize. The understanding that he was no longer really there. 

When the novelty of pushing his hands through tables and drawers wore off, and he could no longer fool himself into a fantasy of being solid and whole again, he wandered in dazed circuits throughout the apartment. 

At first he walked, as he had been accustomed to doing in the twenty three years he had been alive, and he would try to recall how the thin gray carpet felt beneath him. 

In the time so soon after his passing, it was easier. He could still remember what the scratch on the soles of his feet felt like, and could imagine the dips in the floor where the concrete beneath wasn’t quite smooth enough. He would trail his fingers over the stark white walls, trying to sense the bumps and ridges in the paint passing underneath the ridges of his skin. 

The first time he floated through the floor was when, as he pretended to sit cross-legged over his unmade bed, he made the arbitrary decision that he wanted to go into the bathroom. From there, he simply _fell_ , as if the bed and the floor and everything else between him and the bathroom below did not exist.

He had ‘landed’ on his back, sprawling out on the tiled floor in a haphazard pile— though that was only because he remembered there was supposed to be a floor to catch him. Later, he would wonder what would have happened had he not come to that important realization.

But then the movers came, dressed in their blue caps and armed with cardboard boxes, ready to dismantle his illusion.

They gossiped amongst each other as they rifled through what had once been his sanctuary, defiling everything they touched as they wondered what had happened to the boy who had lived and died in this place. A number of speculations were presented for the movers’ entertainment: a drug overdose, a robbery gone wrong, a suicide. 

Their theories didn’t really matter; it was nothing to them, a game to play in order to pass the time while they packed his books into the boxes. A morbid way to ease the discomfort of standing in a place where some poor, nameless soul had lost their life. 

Like vultures, they stripped away everything in sight, pecking and prodding through his most intimate belongings. They ravaged his dresser drawers, pulling out their contents like long strings of innards; they devastated the neat alignment of his kitchen and threw his utensils down like scattered bones. They ripped it all apart, until all they left behind was the skeletal carcass of an empty apartment he had once called his own. 

They had saved his bed for last, with its rumpled navy sheets still in the imprint of a vague mortal form. They stripped it clean and carried it down the stairs; even as he stood before them all, with his arms splayed forward to block them from moving any further. 

They had walked right through his defense, deaf to his screams as he pleaded for them to stop, because he was nothing to them. He wasn’t real. 

And when the front door shut for the last time, he was alone. 

…

Alone. 

…

_Alone_.

…

The word became his only companion, and a curse. It dripped at a steady pace, like a lone droplet of water from a faucet, at the back of his mind. It was the only thing which was real to him— no longer did anything exist outside the crushing weight of solitude. 

He liked to linger on the back deck, most days. It was the only way he could stand outside of the shadows, now that he was unable to turn on the lights in the evening hours. He would sit with his back to the small amount of wall which lined the deck space, and his legs stretched out in front of him. In the quiet thrum of the city spinning around him, he would stare up towards the infinite skyscrapers which encased his prison.

He had quickly learned, from his exercise in phasing through a solid floor, that the rules of existence had been rewritten in the time since he had been alive to the time he died. Over time he realized that in order to maintain the illusion, he always had to remember what it was like when he existed in the real world, back when the real world affected him. He had to consciously feel all of it, just to maintain a semblance of normalcy.

But he still had to face an impossible question: how could he evoke something that was once a simple, implicit facet of reality? 

It was easier, in those early days, to not accidentally fall through solid surfaces. He could still vaguely remember the sensations and details of the immutable world around him, and he could draw on those hazy feelings to give himself the comfort of corporeality.

As time wore on, however, it became exhausting, trying to recall everything that had once made him alive. 

Gravity no longer held him to the earth. The weather meant nothing to him; rain and snow fell through his hands whenever he would hold them up to catch the droplets and flakes. The breeze which stirred the growing blades of grass did not touch his skin. 

Even heat and cold were hazy concepts, their lingering memories disappearing from his mind like what he thought water sliding through his fingers had once felt like, as he laid on the deck during muggy summer nights and heavy blizzards. 

Eventually, he gave up trying to remember what those sensations were like. He figured it was for the best, to let go of the things he couldn’t have anymore. Despite enduring something as permanent as death, it was obvious there was a force which held his soul to the physical world; keeping it still visible to him, yet always just beyond his reach.

And he soon learned there was more he wouldn’t be allowed to have.

The first time he had seen what would happen if he tried to wander too far from the place he had died, it hadn’t even been on purpose. His despondency had been so great that he hadn’t once tried to leave in all the time that had passed since he became like this.

He had been sitting on the deck on a bright summer’s afternoon; he could only guess that it was the first days of the season, as he had deduced from the amount of time the sun spent in the bright blue sky. It was the point in time when lingering on the small expanse of wood was only just becoming his custom.

For some time since his passing, a group of birds had begun perch along the courtyard wall. They always sung to each other, flitting from the stone wall up into the afternoon air, blissfully unaware as he called back to them. 

On that day, he sat along the very edge of the deck with his arms in his lap, watching them with absentminded focus to numb the boredom. One of his arms had eventually fallen off to his side, draping into the open space between the raised platform and the ground below— and into nothingness. 

It was the first time he had truly panicked, since he woke up that fateful day and saw his own eyes staring blankly up at him. 

He stayed away from the deck for days after that, and instead remained in the safety of the sunlight which would be cast across the empty living room floor in the afternoon hours.

He would look at his arm for hours, twisting to view it from every angle. He would find it to still appear whole to him, and then stretch it forward through the glass doors to see his fingers appear on the outside. Over and over again, moving through the motions on rote, trying to find any reason for why it had vanished so suddenly that day.

Once he was sufficiently convinced he retained every part of himself, he moved from inside the apartment to the same spot along the edge of the deck, and he would repeat the motions. He would watch the length of his arm disappear before his eyes, as though it passed through an invisible wall which he could not see beyond. 

That was when he learned he couldn’t leave the place in which he had died. 

He would continue to watch the birds on the wall. From there, he would start to reach out to them. Only to watch his arm vanish into nonexistence. 

He was so _achingly_ lonely. 

Sometimes, a wandering thought would snake into his mind; the dismayed question of what he had done in his life to deserve this sort of punishment.

Because it was a punishment, was it not? To be forced to linger in the empty place where his soul had left his body, to not be allowed even the company of the stray animals which eventually came to his back door. It was the only answer he could think of to explain why he had been cursed to this sort of non-existence. However, he couldn’t fathom what terrible crime he could have committed to have this inflicted on him.

He would think back to the things he had done, and the things he hadn’t done, searching for an elusive cause to this perpetual nightmare. But the more he tried to remember what those actions had been, the less memories he came back with; and he eventually realized that he was forgetting himself. 

From there, his next recourse was to wonder what would happen if he tried to step through the barrier entirely. It was an intoxicating prospect, the realization that cause and effect finally applied to something he did after so long spent being unable to enact any sort of change on himself. So he began to speculate further, and asked if the barrier could save him from this painful existence. 

The more he considered it, the more it became an increasingly appealing option; after all, whatever it was, it affected him when nothing else could.

Eventually, he had decided he would try to find the answer. 

It was a bleak day, when late autumn was on the cusp of freezing into winter, when he made the attempt. Gray clouds hung heavy on the horizon. The weather was fitting, in a strange way; like an outward reflection of the fog clouding his mind and heart. Dead leaves had piled into the corners of the walled-in backyard, decayed and forgotten in the shadows cast by the high cinderblock walls.

Underneath the dreary sky, he had stood poised at the edge of the deck as though he balanced on the bow of a ship, with his toes just barely dipping into the open space in front of him. Parts of his feet phased through the surface beneath him, creating odd pockets where pale wood merged with his skin. He was having trouble remembering what it was supposed to be like, to stand on the edge like that, with parts of him hanging out into open air.

He wavered in the oppressing silence, like a leaf just barely remaining on its branch as it rustled, helplessly, in the wind. 

He had wanted it to be over. He had been ready to be free of the only companions he had been given since he had passed, the quiet and the emptiness which had hovered around him in an endless fog. He had lifted his leg in front of him, and lowered himself towards the waiting grass— 

—but then, he heard a rustle.

He had looked up from his foot, where the ends of his toes had vanished through the invisible wall, and peered towards the other end of the yard. 

The grass had grown exponentially, in however long it had been since he had died. He would often try to guess at how tall it must have gotten, as the seasons wore on. Around that time, he had wagered that if he could stand among it, the blades would reach up to his shins. 

And as he stood there, dumbfounded, he observed as the slightly yellowed grass wavered and shook before him. 

He had raised himself back up towards the deck, and watched in awe as a tiny creature poked its head through the foliage. Bright green eyes blinked up at him, and he had returned the gesture with equal confusion.

A moment later, the small kitten they belonged to emerged from the untamed yard, like a fragment of shadow separating from the larger source. It snuffled against the lip of the deck before it leaped up, and moved through his legs to stand atop the wooden surface.

He hadn’t been sure whether he had wanted to laugh, or to cry, or maybe a bit of both, while he watched the creature curl into a ball within his foot. 

The cat couldn’t see him, just as the birds couldn’t. But unlike the birds, the cat— and its friends, Sun came to learn over time that it had many of those— would wander up to the deck and lounge on the warm wood, close enough for him to pretend he could touch their thick fur coats. 

It was a temporary respite from his solitude. It had been so long since he was able to exist around a living creature, to see something other than shadows and growing grass. After all, he didn’t even get the luxury of having himself for company; whenever he would peer into the lone mirror on the bathroom wall, and he would only see the dark shadows and empty shower at his back.

The stray cats made it easier, somehow, to bear the loneliness and recall a minuscule part of what he had once been. They may not have been able to see him; but being able to watch them grow up before his eyes provided a slight balm to the deep ache inside his chest. Though he may not have been able to remember much from his previous life, something inside of Sun began to recall a fierce longing he had once had, while he basked in the company of the animals who returned to the deck.

As he passed the endless days with the growing cats which gathered by his side, the realization became clearer. It was one that had been growing steadily in his quiet thoughts, long before he had died. It only took the kittens sprawling out within the illusion of his legs to make him remember it.

He had wanted to spend endless days and nights in someone’s arms, to hear laughter in a place he could call home. To hear the words, “Welcome home,” whenever he walked through his front door and was met only with silence and darkness. With lazy days spent lounging on the couch and watching the cheesy movies he remembered loving so much.

He couldn’t have that, anymore. But that desire had evolved, growing quietly inside of him since he had died into something just as strong. 

He at least wanted to see another person, before he went. 

It was easy for him to make the decision to linger, once he realized that he couldn’t seek out what laid beyond the invisible walls of his prison until he could see another person again. Even despite the deep ache of loneliness and despair, the hope of being able to experience some semblance of existence with another person was enough to make him stay, for a little while longer. 

And so, until someone came to him, he would wait. It would be okay if they couldn’t see him; so long as he wasn’t alone, it would be more than enough for him. 

Time marched on after that, sweeping him along in its relentless pursuit. He still stayed despite the tide pulling him further and further along, hoping that he would get to possess the now priceless feeling of having another person at his side. 

And eventually, the universe deemed it time for him to be given a reprieve from his solitude. 

..:|:..

There had been no warning of what was to come. The day it happened had been like any other. Quiet and lifeless.

He had been laying on the living room floor, sprawled like a starfish with his arms raised above his head, and taking in the uniform shadows which clung to the high ceiling. If he squinted hard enough, he could picture the silhouettes of cats playing and leaping in the darkness.

It was like a lightning strike when the front door opened suddenly, almost violently.

It swung inward on its hinges, to firmly hit against the wall it sat beside. The sound of rushing cars and pedestrian conversations quickly invaded the dead silence of the apartment, chasing away the stillness and leaving chaos in its wake. 

If Sun had still possessed a beating heart, it would have rocketed out of his chest.

For however long he had lingered in this place, the only sounds he had heard were those of the cats as they mewed and clawed and slept on his deck— where the orange paint had long faded away under the ceaseless elements— and the distant roar of the cityscape around his tiny bubble of existence. He’d grown used to the way the silence buzzed in his ears, to the way his voice was the only one he was able to hear. 

It was what he had been waiting for, all this time alone in the shadows. The prelude to a coming change. Yet, when that unmistakable sound of a lock clicked, and the door pushed inward to allow daylight to flood the hallway, his first instinct was to fly through the nearest wall.

He was quick to orient himself in the darkened bathroom, where the shock of what was happening had yet to fully release him from its clutches. 

Despite knowing what awaited him outside of the closed door, Sun wasn’t sure how to best handle this sudden incursion into his tomb. Being faced with the presence of living people in his apartment for the second time since he had died was far more daunting than he had anticipated.

Voices quickly arose from outside, muffled through the thin door and the walls as he clung to the shadows.

“…This…main living…”

Sun inched nearer to the closed door, and pressed his head as close to the wood as he dared without falling through it.

He assumed it to be a woman that was speaking, gravel-voiced and low. Though, her words quickly became distorted and lost to his ears.

It was cowardice which kept him in the bathroom, causing him to shy away from the prospect of following his unexpected visitors. The last time anyone other than him had been in the apartment, the people in blue clothing hadn’t been able to see him, or hear him. He didn’t exist to the living, but they were plenty real to him; and though he had chosen to linger in the apartment for the sole purpose of waiting for this time to come, he was stricken with the fear of facing that reality once again. The fact that he didn’t exist to them.

As he strained to follow the one-sided conversation taking place outside, he could discern at least two pairs of footsteps circling in the empty room outside his hiding place. He had yet to hear the speaker’s companion utter anything, though; at least, anything that he could pick up.

He wasn’t sure how long he lingered at the door before he grew tired of trying to parse what the stranger was saying through the solid surface, as well as across the distance between him and her.

Instead of going to face the visitors head-on, he chose to float off of the bathroom floor. He rose slowly, like a swimmer would from the bottom of the ocean, and a moment later he barely poked his head through the smooth surface of the upstairs loft.

The voices were clearer then, with nothing but air between him and their owners.

“The appliances have all been updated, as you can see.”

Rushing water splashed in a fierce burst against a metallic surface, ringing out harshly into the otherwise quiet atmosphere. Sun raised himself slightly higher, such that his eyes, nose, and mouth were clear of the dark blue carpet.

“Out there is the backyard. There is a space set aside for gardening if you want, but you will have to follow the guidelines on what plants are allowed.”

The gravelly words indicated to him the speaker was giving a tour of the apartment. 

“Is that in the agreement?”

Sun twitched, unexpectedly, at the new voice entering the conversation. It sounded like another woman; her question was pitched low, and she was remarkably quiet despite the vaulted ceiling which carried her voice to him.

Even though the stranger hadn’t spoken more than five words, her voice flowed, gently smoothing across his frayed mind. Sun unconsciously followed the direction it came from, drawn in by her presence like he was to the dim flicker of the fireflies in the late summer evenings. He moved to peer through the base of the glass bannister which barricaded the loft from the open air above the living space.

Looking down onto the first floor, he saw a stout, older woman standing by the sliding glass doors, with a dark brown clipboard clenched between her manicured fingers. Her platinum blonde hair was blinding in the sunlight, along with the bright green eyes which she fixed on her companion with a never-changing scowl. She was entirely unfamiliar to him.

Sun’s attention drifted away from her, before focusing on the other person in the apartment.

Her back was turned to him as she looked out towards the unkempt backyard, with her arms seemingly crossed across her chest. Her hair, black as the night sky and streaked through with an undercurrent of deep brown, tumbled down her back in thick waves.

Though the baggy clothes she wore concealed much of her lithe frame, Sun could tell she was standing stiffly. She leaned back onto her left leg, with her position angled slightly behind her. To him, she seemed ready to sprint for the front door at a moment’s notice.

For several long breaths, his eyes were drawn to a tall bow which was affixed at the top of her head. It was a curious accessory; he couldn’t recall seeing someone dressed like that before, though he knew that lack of memory didn’t mean much. Fashion trends could have drastically changed in the time since he had died.

Still, he liked to have thought that he would have remembered seeing someone like her in the _before_ time.

As he stared down at the top of her head, he belatedly realized that she and the older woman were turning to face the rest of the room.

He shifted backwards, keeping his wide eyes just barely above the floor such that he could continue watching their exchange from a distance.

When the woman finished turning, he drank in the sight of her expression eagerly; despite the passive, blank look on her face.

Her eyes were as bright and hard as shards of amber, mixed through with orange and golden light that shone even without the sunlight bouncing off of her irises. The corners of her pale lips were held in careful rigidity, not so much as twitching while she glanced around the emptiness before her.

The low angle of her brow barely shifted as she took in her surroundings, even while the older woman, who Sun presumed to be the current landlord of his apartment, continued to espouse the amenities of the place with all the energy of a lazing cat.

Every so often, the nameless, ebony-haired girl would turn her sights up towards the loft. Sun shrank back even further, hiding away in the faded shadows.

He knew she couldn’t see him; but he didn’t want to have to face that fact, all the same.

The two women soon went to observe the bathroom, and Sun finally pulled himself fully into the loft; the end of his tail surfaced through the floor just before he heard the door click open and the distant hum of the lightbulbs turn on downstairs.

He curled his tail around his legs as he hovered in the air, laying parallel to the floor with his ear pressed to the carpet.

It didn’t sound like the two of them spent very long in the room. Soon after they had entered, he heard the lights turn off and the door shut with a quiet thud. 

“Upstairs is the loft. I would recommend you put your bed up there.”

“Alright.”

Their footsteps, muffled through the cheap fabric on the lower floor, began to approach the direction of the front door.

Instead of diving back down into the bathroom to follow the pair from behind, Sun chose to slowly venture out into the open space above the living room. He kept as close to the ceiling as he could, without letting his head poke into the solid surface, and followed the wall which formed the entryway’s low ceiling. Then, he flipped upside down, and shuffled down the wall to peek his head below the lip of the ceiling where it abruptly ended.

At the end of the hallway, the two women were going through the motions of locking and subsequently unlocking the electronic mechanism on the front door. The woman with the bow in her hair still had her arms crossed as she watched her guide, who eventually returned the apartment keys into the pocket of her pea-green petticoat.

Then, she turned to the younger woman.

“Your move in is scheduled for next week,” she said. She tapped a manicured finger against the surface of the clipboard she held. “You will only have that day to bring in any furniture, and you are responsible for your own moving expenses, so be punctual.”

The black-haired woman nodded once, to show she was listening to what she was being told.

Sun felt a bubble of hope grow stronger and brighter in his chest, pushing away that heavy and cold fear which had cinched tight when the pair had first come into the space he had occupied, alone, for so long.

Someone was finally moving into the apartment?

And it sounded increasingly like it was going to be the curious black-haired girl, too.

He wondered if this was what dreaming had once felt like, back when he was still capable of sleeping. He rubbed at his eyes, to be sure of whether the sights and sounds of the two women before him would dispel once he reopened them.

“Any major renovations will come out of your deposit, and you will need my approval before anything is done. That includes painting the walls.”

The black-haired woman hardly seemed like she could put the effort into nodding along with what she was being told.

“Alright.”

The older woman didn’t seem interested in actually getting affirmation from her companion, as she continued to press on without acknowledging the agreements she was receiving.

“No pets are allowed, no androids or other robotic assistants…”

Somehow, Sun got the impression that the prospective resident wasn’t much of a pet person. She fixed the blonde woman with a cold, blank look as she continued to rattle off the list of banned activities.

“You have no-one else listed on your lease…so any unauthorized residents will be causes for a strike on your record.”

Then, the woman looked up from reading by rote her clipboard, and firmly pressed her finger to the papers there.

“And one more thing,” she said sternly. Somehow, her scowl managed to deepen when she met the other woman’s honeyed gaze. “Any gatherings of more than five people are _forbidden_. Failure to comply will be cause for immediate eviction. Do you understand?”

Sun’s head twitched, inadvertently, as he listened to that final order.

The room suddenly seemed much louder; more voices rushed in to wash over the woman’s croaking tone.

A steady thrum of music ran underneath garbled, foreign conversations. The voices, unfamiliar and quiet, were so muffled he couldn’t begin to discern what any of the speakers were saying as they fought to speak above the energetic music which filled his ears.

It was inexplicable. It should have been impossible; he could remember the press of bodies against his own, firm and solid and _real_. Laughter buoyed him on its wavering currents, moving his body on its own as though he were reliving a lost memory through his own eyes.

The sounds carried him forward slowly, through a crowd of blurred shadows which faced him with bright neon smiles painted onto their empty gray faces, as they stood on the darkened living room floor. His feet were moving on their own, slowly stepping on the solid surface.

The forms of the bodies around him curled upward out from dark gray smoke, reaching towards him with weightless arms.

He didn’t know who any of them were. But he knew, deep in his bones, that he had once called them _friends_.

The memory blurred; the smoke people faded away into oppressive fog. It pressed against him on all sides, encasing him in deep charcoal shadows.

He remembered the sensation of exhaustion with its presence. It rushed in to fill the void he had felt for so long; the heaviness of his limbs grew stronger, the pull of his eyelids downward became more impossible to fight. His tongue felt listless in his mouth, weighing him down, _down_ , until he became enveloped by the fabric of thin bedsheets on top of his skin and across his eyes.

Darkness.

He flinched away from the cover over his eyes, but he couldn’t move to push it off of him. It was crushing, all-encompassing, dragging him down into the depths and away from those sights and sensations that he had forgotten he had once experienced. He didn’t know where he was, which direction he faced. 

He didn’t know who he was.

Fear pounded in his veins in the place of blood.

He wanted to cry out from its cold presence, even though deep down, he knew no-one was going to hear him.

“…I understand.”

The soft voice broke through the pitch-black void, piercing through and illuminating it with thin strands of amber light.

The shadows bled away from his eyes before he could realize it had left.

Disoriented, he just barely managed to catch himself before he tumbled towards the floor underneath his head. He remained hovering, upside down, with his eyes just barely poking out from underneath the hallway ceiling. He hadn’t moved; for that, he was thankful.

His quickly attention flew to the woman who had spoken the words which broke the curse that had fallen over him.

She still stood with her arms crossed over her chest, as though not much time had passed despite the strange memory that had taken hold of him. His eyes dragged up the height of her profile, starting from her legs, and moving towards the side of her face.

The thick strands of her hair covered a majority of her head, but he could still catch a glimpse of amber through the dark layers, like the flicker of a candle’s light in the void. The same light which had shattered the nightmare that had gripped him with cold fingers.

He then turned his attention to the bow on the top of her head, and focused on studying the shape of it. It quickly became the only thing solidifying his tenuous grip on reality.

Quietly, a voice inside of him whispered that it looked…oddly _cute_ on her. The innocent contour of the ribbon contrasted nicely against her reserved demeanor.

Before he had the opportunity to study the woman further, however, the landlord finally opened the front door. 

He flinched with the sounds that fell across the hallway, and was slow to realize that his visitors were going to walk through the open space and into the outside world. Just as abruptly as they had entered the apartment and thrown Sun’s existence into chaos, they were gone.

With their departure, the apartment was once again thrown into silence.

Sun drifted down towards the floor several moments after the lock had clicked shut in its latch. He flipped slowly, head over heel, to land on the carpet, while staring at the space the woman had occupied as if he could superimpose her image into the hallway through sheer force of will alone.

It had been so long since he had last been able to feel something, that he almost didn’t register the light sensation fluttering at the base of his stomach, holding him off of the floor such that his bare toes barely made contact with the carpet in all the time he had remained staring, expectantly, at the front door.

He remained there for enough time that, by the time he turned away, the late afternoon sun that had cast long rays across the floor had dipped into the dark purple light of dusk.

Part of him hoped he had lingered there long enough for the woman with ebony hair to come walking back through the doorway; how much time had the landlord said it would be until the woman would move in? A week?

Well, that was nothing to Sun, compared to the eons he had spent confined to an empty apartment. He was practically a master at waiting. 

As it turned out, the wait for that day was excruciating.

Sun didn’t have an easy method of keeping track of time’s passing. The best gauges he had were the rise and fall of the sun, and the changing of the seasons; but he had seen so many days pass him by that they all quickly blended into one large blur where the seasons spun around him in a kaleidoscope of colors, indiscernible from one another in the quiet, empty halls of his memory.

It hadn’t bothered him before, when all he had to look forward to was what the weather would look like the next morning.

But now, with each day that passed, his only recourse was to linger by the front door, as well as by the windows in the loft which overlooked the distant street. He was sustained by the hope to catch a glimpse of black hair and amber eyes somewhere amongst the crowds; to capture a hint of a firm, quiet voice through the layers of wood and concrete between him and the outside world.

It had been so long since Sun had been given the gift of something worth looking forward to that he hardly knew what to do with himself, with all the time remaining that led up to his new companion’s arrival. For the first time in his memory, he felt a modicum closer to being _alive_.

Other than the time he spent lingering beside the window and the front door, he passed the time with the stray cats, whenever they would come by the back deck.

They had grown exponentially throughout their many visits to his apartment, and no longer resembled the small balls of fluff and claws that had poked through the tall grass of the backyard. He would hold his hand out to them to watch as they passed through the illusion of his flesh; and though he couldn’t feel their fur, or their presence underneath his skin, he pretended that their company was enough to last him until the woman returned to the apartment.

..:|:..

Despite Sun’s eagerness to have what he began to jokingly call his ‘roommate’, he seldom found he could summon the courage to go and exist in the same space as the woman who had moved in.

There was something about her, he soon came to realize. An aura of exhaustion, of bone-deep weariness which emanated off of her shoulders whenever she came through the front door and thought she was alone. The presence of it felt like the opposing sides of a magnet, pushing him away from her whenever he tried to get close.

Though that despondent air was the cause of the strange shyness which had overcome him, he wasn’t sure why he allowed it to affect him so much; but nonetheless, it prompted him to confine himself to the narrow and dark closet which had been filled only with the woman’s large black coat, and spare cardboard boxes scattered along the floor.

In truth, his day-to-day habits hadn’t changed much with her arrival. All that had been made different was that he now sat in a closet that was barely tall enough to fit him, even when he tried to stand with his feet pressed as close as he could get them to the floor.

It wasn’t the existence he had necessarily hoped for; but the sights and sounds which proved there was someone else in the apartment with him served as more than enough comfort, in those early days of her moving in.

There were occasions where he would venture out, whenever he was certain her attention was diverted elsewhere. He would carefully look over her shoulder, standing several feet apart as she went about cooking her dinner after hours spent away. Now that there was a clock in the apartment in the form of the stove’s clock being turned on, Sun found that time went by much slower; though part of that agonizing crawl could have also been caused by his eagerness for her to come back.

He learned that she liked to read, too. It excited him, when he uncovered that bit of information. He was fairly certain he had liked that when he had been alive; his memory was incredibly fuzzy on the details, but he recalled a strong sense of loss when the movers had come to a part of the apartment which he was fairly certain had once contained tall shelves, of some sort.

She liked to curl into the lonely couch she had pushed into the corner of the room with her back facing the hallway, and the soles of her feet pressed against the opposite wall. Sun would catch glimpses of her silhouette in the few chances he took to peek his head through the closed closet door; she would linger there for hours, sometimes, completely lost in the book in her hands. 

She had also been quick to fill a small corner of the kitchen counters with potted plants, with small firm bulbs and flowers bursting in the dark spots of dirt. They were bright, almost cheery, serving as one of the few spots of color— along with the deep blue couch— dotted around the otherwise monochromatic decor.

He was careful to not accidentally appear in front of her, however.

He just…wasn’t sure he was ready to face the reality that she wouldn’t be able to see him. It was so much easier to hide in the dark closet and content himself with the knowledge that there was finally someone else for him to spend the infinite time with; even if she didn’t know he existed.

In the nighttime, however, he allowed himself free rein over the apartment. He would slink fully out of the nearly-bare closet when the shadows loomed, and the woman had treaded on quiet feet up to the loft. 

At the time, he still wasn’t used to the novelty of furniture in the living space; though it was incredibly sparse, with the small blue couch tucked into the corner of the room, and a small dining set placed in the center of the room. But despite the meager and unfamiliar belongings, Sun felt more at home than he had in all the time he had lingered in the emptiness on his own.

In the first few days he would drift up towards the loft, and peer over the staircase’s landing towards the bed which was pressed against the wall across from him.

The woman often slept with the bedsheets drawn close to the top of her head, such that her face wasn’t visible to him from the low angle he hovered at. He would linger only for a moment to be fully certain she was asleep, before he went out to sit on the back deck and stare up at the dark sky.

He didn’t get much time to spend out there, these days; the cats seldom came by anymore, having learned that there was now a living presence in the place that had once been their refuge. And he didn’t want to risk sitting out there and not noticing the woman waking up, before he had a chance to return to his self-imposed confinement.

As a result of his caution, he didn’t get much time to himself. The woman slept little and, unbeknownst to her, she had quickly overtaken the place Sun frequently sought out for comfort. She would rise early, awakening before even the sun itself. Every morning she would make a single cup of tea, before retreating to the back deck which he had been the sole occupant of since he had died.

He made sure he had retreated back to his quiet closet before she came down the stairs each morning, dispelling the quiet peace which overtook the city skyline as he ventured back to hide himself away.

It truly was enough for him, at first. To stay as far back as he could, and trick himself into thinking that he was content to exist in a tiny room and listen to the sounds of life moving on outside the slated doors which shut him in. The last thing he wanted to do was intrude on the woman’s privacy, even if she wasn’t aware of the invasion.

As he stood in the quiet space, though, he eventually realized it really wasn’t enough. Like a starving man stranded in the baking sun of the desert, he had gotten a small stream of water to sustain himself with. He quickly found himself greedily, selfishly wanting more.

The breaking point came slowly, simmering underneath his thoughts in a nearly-silent thrum. It grew steadily stronger in the passing days, bubbling slightly faster and causing him to push the thoughts back down, the ideas of standing in front of his roommate and pretending she could see him. 

Still, he would grow bolder, with the self-consciousness slipping off his shoulders. He would linger in the center of the living room when he could hear the stirrings of life from the loft, instead of flying down the hall as he once had. He would poke his head out further through the door without making sure the woman wasn’t around first, despite knowing she couldn’t react to him either way.

He could no longer continue shying away from the fact that he was dead and she was not.

And that was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it?

Facing the reality that he didn’t exist.

Nearly two weeks after the woman had first moved into the apartment, the desire to stop hiding finally boiled over. It wasn’t caused by some sweeping epiphany, or a surge of bravery; he was simply tired of confining himself to the four narrow walls and shadowy darkness.

By the time he stepped out of the closet doors, nearly two weeks after the woman had moved into the apartment, he hadn’t intended for it to be any more eventful than the times that he would stand in the corner of the living room and listen to the sound of the woman cooking and occasionally murmuring her thoughts into the quiet air.

He had only wanted to exist in silence, outside of the closet, while the woman went about her own life in blissful unawareness of his presence.

Across the hallway, the bathroom door had been shut for some time, with weak yellow light spilling out from underneath the gap between the thin wooden barrier and the floor. The steady sound of flowing water echoed dimly from within the room whenever he had poked his head through the closed closet doors to try and ascertain what was going on outside his small quarters.

However, by the time he emerged from the closet, the sound of water had long cut off; leaving only the hum of the ceiling fan to echo in his ears.

He quickly decided to go towards the back deck, as he stood in the quiet and wondered what he should do with his sudden boldness. 

The steps he took across the carpet were silent while he pretended to walk instead of choosing to float, as had quickly become his favored method of traversing his enclosure.

In the moment, he wasn’t concerned with passing in front of the bathroom. It hadn’t even occurred to him, the possibility that anything was going to happen while he walked in front of it.

It was simply a result of bad luck as, with almost comedic timing, the door flung open, allowing the golden light to flow out into the hallway and capture him in its gaze.

Shock, pure and unfiltered, stopped him in his tracks; his feet were kept firmly on the floor, while his eyes shot towards the shadow which stood haloed against the bathroom’s wavering lightbulbs.

His attention was drawn, first and foremost, to the top of the figure— the woman’s— head. To the lack of a ribbon tied within her dark, damp hair; to the pair of black, cat-like ears perked atop the crown of her skull.

At the base of his spine, his tail twitched fiercely. Deep recognition, which was prompted by the sight of those ears, surged under his skin while he stared at the non-human features which mirrored his own.

The ribbon suddenly made much more sense, now that he knew what she hid underneath it; but he quickly thought that he liked her much better without the bow. Her ears suited her far better than the fabric ever could.

Then, he drew his sight down, following the beads of water that dotted her pale skin.

Light flared in his chest as he stared into the bright, amber eyes which were cast towards the direction of the floor.

When her gaze met his, he nearly forgot that he was dead; he could almost imagine the pounding of a nonexistent heart in his ribcage, the strain of his lungs as he forgot once again how to breathe. A long-forgotten warmth spread out underneath his fingers, drifting up his arms, and rising through his neck to settle into his cheeks.

He was quickly reminded of that unfortunate fact when a hairbrush was shot through his abdomen, with no sensation to accompany the strange phenomenon of a physical object passing through his flesh.

..:|:..

When the bathroom door slammed shut in his face, he blinked in surprise at the presence of the dark wood where the woman had previously stood.

Belatedly, he realized she had been there while clad only in a pure, white towel. His face stung, with an unfamiliar intensity, as the image surfaced above the roiling current of his thoughts.

The concept of privacy was hazy, and something that hadn’t concerned him for quite some time; but he knew it surely still held meaning to the living.

It was what had initially urged him to stay away from the woman as she went about her daily life. Though he had to admit, it was likely for the best. The sight of her was far more striking than he could have guessed. He could clearly picture the droplets of water trailing down her skin as though she still stood before him.

His face still held onto that unfamiliar warmness while he faced the solid surface, although the image of the woman staring directly at him was still burned into his eyes, flaring to life whenever he blinked.

The realization struck him hard enough to make him want to topple over.

She had stared _directly_ at him.

She had reacted to him.

She had seen him.

For several, long moments, Sun forgot how to move, while he stared with astonished wonder at the door.

There was no misunderstanding what he had just experienced. He knew the woman had looked straight at him. Her eyes had widened at the same time his had, in blatant recognition of his presence on the other side of the doorway. 

Did that mean he existed to her?

He blinked several times as he shook himself from his stupor. There was only one way to find out.

With small steps, he shuffled closer to the bathroom door.

“Um…hey?” he tried.

His own voice sounded strange, in his ears. He had seldom spoken, since his death. There had never been a reason to. There hadn’t been anyone around to hear him.

He didn’t know why he bothered now; but there was that ever-persistent hope underneath his surprise, urging him to try and reach out to the person who he had waited for in the quiet and the dark, for so long.

“I’m armed!” Her voice rang out quickly, though it was slightly muffled through the thin wood. A moment of hesitation followed, and then she continued, “And I’m calling the police!”

Sun remained silent once she finished speaking. While her words bounced around in his head, the thought occurred to him that the threat she had uttered was quite strange.

His gaze shifted off the door, and towards the living room. On a whim, he floated down the hallway.

Once he passed into the larger portion of the apartment, he turned his head towards the countertops of the kitchen. His attention quickly landed on the thin piece of glass which balanced on the precarious edge of the steel basin of the sink, where he knew she had put it before she had gone into the bathroom, just under an hour ago. 

When he returned back to standing in front of the bathroom door, he could barely contain the laughter bubbling in his chest.

“Your Scroll is on the counter out here. Do you keep another one in the bathroom?” he asked, once he had returned to the spot of the floor he had occupied.

Several long moments passed in heavy silence as his question went unanswered.

Eventually, he backed away from the door, and moved to crouch against the opposite wall, with his hands held limply between his knees.

He stared up at the door between him and the woman, and resolved himself to waiting for her to come out. To the prospect of having to explain to her what had happened to him; why he was in the apartment.

As more time passed without her speaking, however, he began to worry that she genuinely thought he was in some way threatening to her. He didn’t blame her for that notion; a stranger in the place she had considered solely her own surely had to be a shock.

He resolved to trying to ease her fear. “Please come out. I promise I can’t hurt you. Trust me, I’m just as surprised as you are.”

He half-heartedly raised his hands while he spoke, and the thought finally occurred to him that he didn’t know how she was able to see and hear him in the first place. No-one else had, no matter how loudly he had screamed at them to notice his presence.

Quiet shuffling met his ears from the other side of the door.

“What do you mean, ‘can’t hurt me’?” the woman asked, her voice laden with suspicion as she pushed his words back to him, underneath the gap of the door.

“Come out and I’ll show you,” he answered. It was the only thing he could offer. He certainly wasn’t going to venture into the bathroom to prove his point. If the imagined sight of him floating through the closed door wasn’t enough to deter him, he also didn’t want to intrude on her while he picked up on her apparent agitation at his sudden presence.

His suspicion was confirmed when he heard a quiet, unamused laugh flutter from behind the door.

He sighed after the silence returned.

None of this was going at all as he had hoped.

“I know it seems like a trap. All I can do is tell you the truth. I can’t—” Sun bit his tongue, and narrowed his eyes at the wood in front of him. Assurances of his inability to hurt her didn’t seem like the best approach to take, while he stood as a stranger outside her bathroom door. He hesitated, before changing his approach with the hope that she would believe what he was going to say.

“—I _won’t_ hurt you. I promise. I haven’t come in there yet, have I?”

His fingers weaved anxiously through their gaps while he talked to the dark wood in front of him.

A few moments later, he heard the latch click open, and he forced himself into stillness.

The gap caused by the door moving into the hallway caused a sliver of light to slice across the shadows. He didn’t flinch from the change, even as a shadow emerged in the space between the door and its framing.

A single hardened, golden eye peered down at him through the crack.

It was a strange, yet welcome sensation, the feeling of being seen. 

Unbridled relief swept in surging waves over him, crashing on his shoulders and pushing him to the floor while he remained crouched. He bore the woman’s scrutiny eagerly, and relished in the attention; even if she was looking at him with clear suspicion written across what little of her stony face he could see.

Her eye traveled across the smallness of his figure, starting at his feet, and working slowly up towards his face. He felt his jaw clench tight when her attention began darting between his eyes, across his hair, and then settling on his mouth. A moment later, her focus returned to his eyes.

He met her gaze as evenly as he could. He didn’t want to startle her, now that she seemed calm enough to look at him with some unreadable light flaring in the eye that was visible to him.

Absently, he moved his tail around his back, and layered it across his lap.

The woman’s attention snapped towards the movement faster than he could recognize what had happened.

Despite the shock which jolted through his chest when her eye widened at the sight of his tail, he kept himself impossibly still.

Several moments later, the woman pushed the door open further, and moved to stand once again in the empty doorway.

Water dripped with quiet, steady beats at the heels of her feet, falling from the ends of her exposed hair which draped down her back. One hand clung to the edge of the door, while the other held tight onto a bottle; though her grip loosened incrementally while they stared, with wide eyes, at each other. 

Sun’s gaze drifted back up to the ears on the woman’s skull, and remained there while they twitched under his attention. Their ebony fur was streaked through with white tufts at their bases, contrasting with the equally dark strands of hair surrounding them.

His attention fell down towards her face next. He steadfastly refused to let his gaze fall any lower on her body than that.

Instead, he studied the way her eyes were focused on his hands, which still hung limply between his legs. He focused on the slight clench of her jaw as she stared at him, the way she glistened with small, dewy beads of water dotted across her pale skin.

Their gazes met, a few moments later.

Sun felt like he was going to drown in pools of sunlight while he stared at her; it was a fate he gladly welcomed, the longer he looked. The warmth in her eyes melted away the hardened expression she bore, softening her face into a gentle sort of awe, as she continued to look at him. 

He wondered what she saw, when she looked at him. It had been so long, since he had been able to see his own visage. Did she see the dark pit in his chest that he had carried, since he had died? Did she see the loneliness etched into his face, watching as it faded away underneath the light in her gaze?

More than anything, he wanted to ask her. He wanted to know _everything_ about her.

He didn’t get the chance to try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the next were originally going to be placed later in the timeline than they are now. But Sun's perspective is just too much fun to write, and I wanted to get his thoughts in sooner rather than later. He's much more open with how he feels than Blake is! We'll get back to the present soon enough, though.


	6. Chapter 6

_Neon Katt was someone that did not belong in Atlas City._

_For years, she had worn bright pink skirts and tight blue tank-tops in defiance of the capital’s rigid and cold monochromatic scenery. Rainbow pins and bright yellow stickers studded her vibrant purple backpack like priceless jewels, and drew the tired eyes of passerby, willingly or otherwise. The long pigtails of her bright orange hair screamed, “Look at me!”, almost as much as the long and thin feline tail which extended out of the pale expanse of her back._

_Her roller skates clacked along the perfect sidewalks far louder than the heels of any of the businesswomen, while she blasted her music loud enough to be heard by passerby through the bulky pink-and-blue headset she could typically be seen with. And just to make sure no-one missed the memo of her particularly obvious Faunus appearance, she had engineered plastic, glow-in-the-dark cat ears to sit atop the top of that headset._

_She hummed to herself as she raised onto one leg, barely wavering as she skated forward, while heavy, slow beats pulsed in her ears._

_Someone like Neon Katt wasn’t supposed to exist in Atlas City._

_But she did it anyway._

_She_ was _doing it, as she casually spun a lazy circle around a lone man, while together they made their way down a crowded sidewalk in the Sanus district; also known as the last place anyone would expect to see a young Faunus woman casually blowing bubblegum._

_“Hey, Flynt,” she called out, after popping the bubble which she had been holding outside of her mouth._

_She completed another circuit around her companion, before returning to his side. Her hand rose to the edge of her headset as she went, and lowered the volume of her music to a quiet thrum with the touch of her finger against the holographic interface on the thick plastic band._

_The dark-skinned young man barely tilted his head to acknowledge that she had spoken to him. From under the brim of his navy-blue fedora, he peered at her through his shaded square glasses._

_“Yes, Neon.” He didn’t form the sound of her name as a question._

_It was a standard early afternoon in the Sanus district; the only pedestrians out at this time, besides the two of them, were the suits on their lunch breaks, hunting for the nearest café or bar._

_She chewed on her gum with stern focus as they continued down the relatively clear sidewalk. As she weaved throughout the various blue and gray-clad men and women for a few moments, she pondered what she was going to do next. She hadn’t really had a question; she had just wanted to say something. Flynt Coal was being strangely quiet that day, even for him._

_What a party killer._

_“When’s your next band practice?” she finally asked. She slowed to match Flynt’s pace. Then, she grinned up at him. “Can I come? I’ve been thinking I want to learn an instrument. What do you think? I’m sure your guys wouldn’t mind.”_

_She pushed herself further forward than Flynt, before spinning on her heel. She continued skating, moving backwards with ease, and uncaring for the people who were walking at her back._

_“I want to do something_ cool _. No offense. Like, the drums!” She mimed holding a pair of drumsticks in each hand, and flailed her fists in front of her._

_Flynt stared at her, nonplussed._

_She continued on, undeterred from his unenthusiastic response. Then her hands stopped mid-beat, and she started wiggling her fingers._

_“Ooh, or the keyboard! That sounds fun!”_

_“Do you actually want to learn an instrument, or are you just bored,” Flynt said, finally going along with her. She could see the beginnings of a smile beginning to form on his lips, and she smirked at the sight._

_It was likely the latter option, if she were being honest with herself; but there was a part of her that was— at least somewhat— interested. Flynt seemed like he had a lot of fun with his trumpet, whenever she hung out with him while he practiced his newest solo._

_Neon moved to circle around Flynt while he walked again. Her tail swished at her back, its soft orange fur brushing against the backs of her calves as she moved._

_“Yeah! I want to learn, trust me! Besides, I need something else to do since my jazzercise club isn’t meeting up right now.”_

_One of Flynt’s eyebrows arched high above his eye as she spoke._

_“‘Isn’t meeting up right now’? Or isn’t meeting with_ you _?”_

_Neon rolled her eyes. She had already told him this story, but she took the bait regardless. “You suggest to a lady that_ maybe _she wouldn’t be as good at rollerskating as you because she’s…ya know,_ top-heavy _, and suddenly you’re kicked out of the group chat!”_

_She scoffed under her breath, and slowly moved around to Flynt’s left, on the side of the pavement which bordered the street. Alongside them, a neat row of cars was lined up, sleek models of black, white, and steel stretching on for as far as the eye could see._

_Close to the curbside, small wells were carved into the clean cement, filled with dark brown mulch and the tall, slender forms of blossoming trees. In the early spring, their branches were just barely covered in small white buds, dotted across their spindly limbs like frozen droplets, the last remnants of winter gripping onto the world.On their opposite side, a tall, white concrete wall separated them from the taller foliage which extended just above the top of the barrier._

_Neon’s eyes darted from the flowing traffic on their left-hand side, and scanned across the row of townhouse apartments which lined the opposite side of the street. The firm, block-like architecture was entirely confirmative to the typical Atlas City aesthetic, as was their varying facades of solid gray concrete, porous white stucco, and brown panelling._

_“I mean, it’s just honesty. I’d rather someone be straight with me than try and be nice, she didn’t have to get so offended— Woah, hey! Hold on,” she called out, cutting herself off mid-sentence. She tipped her heels up, raising the points of her toes skyward, and then came to an abrupt halt._

_Her hand shot out to the side, before her fingers— with her nails painted a vibrant yellow— curled around Flynt’s bicep._

_“What?” Flynt asked. He sounded incredulous, though he didn’t fight further against her hold, even while he tried to continue onward as she tugged him back._

_Much of the foot traffic on the other sidewalk seemed to be condensed around a particular, bright white apartment. Small piles of tan boxes were scattered at the edge of a tall, narrow wall which jutted out from the front of the building, and all around those containers, a trio of uniformed workers milled. Dressed in their dark blue jumpsuits, she guessed them to be movers of some sort._

_Neon squinted to observe the proceedings in more detail, and watched as a pair of men worked to carry a tall, seemingly heavy cardboard box behind the tall dividing wall._

_She wondered what it was about the activity which had drawn her attention. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary; people moved in and out all the time. But this particular place…_

_Her thought fizzled into smoke when, from behind the dividing wall set, presumably, in front of the apartment’s front door, a shadow split away._

_The woman’s hair, dark as pitch, fluttered in thick waves down her back as she moved to address the movers who were carrying the large box between them. They paused in their shuffling as the woman spoke, before she broke away from them._

_“Neon,” Flynt muttered._

_“Shh!” She swatted at his arm with her other hand, while the one she had clamped around his bicep remained firmly affixed there._

_What was it about this place, she thought, that seemed so familiar?_

_The woman crossed the road without a care for any of the potential traffic that could crush her, likely because the Sanus district’s streets were still empty in anticipation of the evening rush hour._

_She quickly walked in the direction of a nondescript white car parked only a couple spaces away; her bright yellow eyes didn’t seem to notice Neon and Flynt as they stood nearby. The bow fixed onto the crown of her skull didn’t waver with her movements._

_Flynt finally tugged against Neon’s hold. Her fingers only tightened, though she wavered in her place, with her wheels rolling her forward towards the curb._

_“Wasn’t it, like, three years ago?” Neon asked. She crossed her arms while the black-haired girl returned to the building across the street, carrying only a single cardboard box. “When the ambulance was here?”_

_They had walked this very sidewalk for years, to get to the music shop Flynt worked at. They had been walking on a very particular night, and had stopped to watch the chaos unfolding in front of them, the whirring green lights atop the white ambulance car, the crowd of people huddled in front of a dividing wall and murmuring amongst themselves._

_At her side, Flynt shrugged, the movement close enough to brush against the edge of her shoulder._

_“Are you sure it was_ that _apartment?” He asked, and pointed towards the building instead of answering her vague question._

_She was tempted to pout at the deflection. Instead, she shook her head. The thick ropes of her pigtails shifted with her movement._

_“Don’t you think it’s weird?” When she looked at that blank white apartment, she guessed that she could see the faint green tinge of ambulance lights emerging from three years in the past, if she squinted._

_She leaned forward, and narrowed her eyes, to see if her theory was true._

_It was._

_“Neon, people move into places where bad things happened all the time.”_

_“Yeah, but—”_

_Flynt finally pulled hard enough to release his arm from Neon’s grasp. She spun to face him, her face contorting into a puffed-out scowl._

_“It’s not like the guy’s still there, right? It’s just an empty apartment. It was going to get filled eventually,” he continued._

_Her scowl deepened, even though she knew he had a point._

_It was just so…_ weird. _To think of the last time she had stood across the street from that apartment…well. It wasn’t good to dwell on sad things, she’d found._

_She couldn’t shake the memory of green lights and the crowded sidewalk, though._

_Her head turned to the side to glance in its direction once more._

_The woman had stopped to speak with the last worker who still stood outside the apartment. Her back was turned towards Neon and Flynt; Neon had barely had the chance to focus on the stiff outline of the woman’s shoulders before she turned, and disappeared behind the small wall._

_“Come on,” Flynt urged. “I have work in less than an hour. If my boss isn’t around, I’ll let you try some of the snares we just got in.”_

_That got Neon’s attention. She spun away from staring towards the empty apartment with a grin spreading across her lips, and followed in Flynt’s wake as he continued their path towards his workplace; and away from that quiet, sad place._

..:|:..

When the girl screamed, everything fell apart. The glass shards of the illusion he had built up over the course of the last two weeks rang out in the aching sound of her voice. It echoed in his ears long after she left, lingering like the silence he had lived in for so long.

He was quickly cast back into shadow, with his reaching hands unable to stop her as she fled from him. The light she had brought with her arrival wouldn’t return for several, agonizing hours.

Sun remained by the front door for some time after she had fled, with his hands pressed to the solid wood and his head bent down to stare at his feet, and the pale outline of the floor through them.

She had left him alone.

_“Get out!”_

Her voice had cracked with the strain of her scream. The force of it had pushed him away from her, back into the closet he had come from, cowering away from her fear. Only when he heard her frantic footsteps approaching the front door, did his own panic become great enough to urge him back into the dark hallway, to try and convince her to stay. 

His pleas to her had fallen on the deaf ears she had wrapped, haphazardly, back underneath the shadow of her black ribbon. When he had hung as close to her as he dared, before she left, he had been able to discern the strands of white fur leaking out from the base of her ears underneath the fabric.

_You’re like me,_ he had thought, as he stared at the side of her face, and studied the outline of the ears she was trying so desperately to hide. Wishing beyond hope that she would just look at him again. _You’re just like me. We’re alone, and we only have each other now,_ was what he had wanted to tell her.

**_“Look, I can explain, just…please don’t go.”_ **

The door slamming in his face was hardly surprising, but it stirred the memories of an oddly-familiar pain all the same; one he hadn’t known existed until it had resurfaced. As though it were little more than a childhood friend, whom he had reconnected with after decades of silence.

With its resurgence, Sun could picture the strange men in blue hats, and tan boxes, in the grains of the wood in front of him, right where the woman had stood.

In the hours after her departure, the result of his own voice rang out pitifully, silently, inside his head. The words were heavy, weighing on his empty thoughts as if to mock him, and his attempts to bring the woman away from the front door.

Was this another cruel, cosmic joke, playing out for the amusement of some unnamed god? Surely, had he not already suffered enough, while he had languished in the quiet and the dark for these countless years?

What sort of humor was there to be found, in the notion that he had finally found someone who could see him, and hear him, only for them to be wrenched away?

When the curtain of night fell outside, he finally forced himself away from the front door. If the woman was ever planning to return, he doubted it would happen before the daybreak. He could only hope that when she came back, she would stay. If only so he could have the opportunity to explain himself to her, to speak with another person again and know they could understand his words.

Thus it was with dragging, slow steps that he ventured through the glass doors, and laid himself out across the deck. The narrow surface could barely encompass his form; had he been alive, his arm would have fallen off the edge opposite the doors, and his fingers would have brushed the freshly shorn blades of grass.

Instead, his arm, up to his elbow, vanished into the open air while he stared up at the clouded sky, and tried not to sink into the wood at his back.

The hazy stars scattered in the void above his head were tinged with golden light that hadn’t been present before, he noticed. He traced strange shapes between the points with his eyes, and in them he kept replaying the sight of the woman peering at him from behind the door between them.

All around him, the far-flung sounds of the city ebbed and flowed. Here, in this empty place, he was at the eye of the storm, where quiet horns and shouts pierced the air.

He tried to catch what the strangers on the other side of the courtyard walls were saying, with all their murmurs and distant shouting, if only to provide himself with a distraction from his voice haunting his thoughts.

It didn’t work, not entirely. He kept finding himself circling back to that small, darkened hallway.

To a crowd of shadows and haunting whispers.

To dim, flashing green lights.

_“Don’t you get it? He’s gone!”_

Sun lurched into an upright position. His arm rose away from the edge of the deck, resurfacing from beyond the unseen barrier.

The unfamiliar voice cracked off the cinderblock walls of the courtyard like lightning, the shape of it ringing in sharp edges. It was harsh enough to cut through the tranquil quiet he had been sinking into, while staring up at the golden stars.

His head jerked down to his lap.

There, both of his hands were curled over his legs, fingers unfurled with palms splayed towards the open sky. He took in the way his tan skin blurred at the edges where his body was supposed to exist, before fading into nothingness.

Unprompted, the fingers of the hand which had draped over the deck’s surface curled into a loose fist. 

He could still picture the quiet green glow, as he looked at his hand. He could just barely recall the way those emergency lights had pulsed on the ceiling, on the walls, illuminating the shadowed crowds of people whose names he’d long forgotten.

When he blinked, the bright, viridescent color splashed across the backs of his eyelids, washing away the gold.

Yet another vision. Just like the one from two weeks prior; when he had imagined the pressing of a crowd against his incorporeal form.

He tightened his fingers, then, just to make sure he could. He couldn’t feel the bite of his fingernails digging into his skin, but it was enough to ground him to the floor.

These hallucinations— these _memories_. They hadn’t occurred previously; not before the woman had arrived.

He didn’t think he had ever been a man who had believed in fate. Yet, part of him wanted to believe this resurgence wasn’t coincidence. Perhaps the unnamed god who found so much amusement in his torture had decided to alleviate his pain somewhat; and had provided him with a means to remember himself, through the presence of his roommate.

It couldn’t have been that simple, he thought. He lowered himself back down to lay on the deck’s surface, and kept his hands folded over his chest. When he was relatively certain his head was flat against the wooden planks, he turned his eyes back towards the distant sky.

There was no denying that the woman was special, even if he forewent the notion of divine intervention. She could see him and hear him, when no-one else had ever been able to. 

The thought caused a strange warmth to stir in his chest, nearly hot enough for him to think that it was what the burning touch of the summer sun had once felt like.

A quiet shuffling broke his musing.

His head tilted to the side. His eyes darted across the small patch of grass, peering into the corners where the shadows pooled; before settling on the dark blue door on the opposite wall.

From underneath the gap between the barrier and the ground, a cat-shaped shadow slunk slowly onto the grass.

He watched it approach in silence. The cats hadn’t come to the apartment in weeks; they were unaccustomed to the presence of a living creature in the building which had been abandoned all their lives. His roommate’s arrival had likely scared them off, something which he had mourned even as he had rejoiced in the novelty of the new experience. 

Now, it was as if the creature knew the apartment’s new resident wasn’t going to be there that night; the shadows, combined with the darkness of its fur, made its bright green eyes blaze in the low evening light while it approached the deck Sun laid on. 

He watched the bottom of the door for a few moments to see if any of the others would be following. But when the black cat jumped onto the deck’s surface, with no sign of any others coming behind it, he moved his head back to its previous position, and returned his attention skyward. 

He just needed to wait, he reminded himself, while the unnamed cat curled into a tight ball within his chest. Within a few minutes, the tiny creature was fast asleep, its quiet breaths overtaking the distant thunder of the cityscape.

He had promised he wouldn’t leave until he could experience what an existence with someone else could have been like. The woman would have to come back eventually; and when she did, he would be ready for her.

..:|:..

“I’ll be back in the morning. We can talk then.”

She stared at the front door as if she were trying to burn a hole through its surface. The yellow of her eyes _blazed_ in the darkness which painted the floor and walls of the hallway. 

Her words were as much a balm to his silent fears, as they were excruciating for him to hear. Sun only wanted her to look at him. He only wanted her to _stay_.

Sun held his tongue as the door clicked shut, instead, and resigned himself to the prospect of waiting through another dark night. To passing the time with the gold-tinged stars, with the company of his stray cats and forgotten memories.

..:|:..

He had been sprawled out over the covers of the woman’s bed for some time when he heard the front door click open. 

Sun had memorized the sound, in the short couple of weeks that had passed since the phenomenon had first started; but somehow, it never failed to send a jolt through the entirety of his frame. Every instance felt like it could have been the last. 

A strange, churning sensation pooled in his stomach when he strained to hear the unmistakable clunk of heavy boots settling within the hallway, followed by the second click of the door closing.

When he moved his head to stare into the sheets he laid on, he was met with the sudden realization that he had, at some point, risen above the bed, and was floating inches away from the dark blankets.

He turned to the other side, and looked up towards the thin line of windows which faced the street outside. The street he had been watching all morning, with no sign of black hair or yellow eyes.

True to her word, however, the woman had come back; yet somehow, it still surprised him to realize that. 

He hadn’t wanted to admit it until now, when he could hear the sound of her shuffling through the hallway, followed by the quiet click of the light switch being turned on. Part of him had been prepared for her to go back on what she had promised. As cool white light filled the apartment from the lights fixed into the vaulted ceiling, he could feel that anxious weight finally lift off his chest.

He sunk through the bed, through the floor, and settled in the center of the dark bathroom before he could do something he would regret, such as making himself known to her before she was ready. Now that the woman was back, he needed to make sure he didn’t scare her off again.

It was hard to predict how he could go about that, though; only two days ago, he hadn’t even known she could see him. 

Outside his small sanctuary, he could hear more thuds and quiet footfalls, on the other side of the wall which faced the kitchen counters. Sun floated towards the bathroom door, and waited until he could hear no more noise. Then, he darted through the surface, and dove into the tiny closet across the hall.

It was where he had stayed, when the woman hadn’t known of his existence. He figured it would make for a relatively good hiding place until she decided she was ready to talk with him.

Laughter nearly bubbled out of his throat when that thought came to him; that prospect, of finally getting to talk to someone, quickly lessened the churn which still stirred in his gut.

The wait for any sort of sign was excruciating. He could feel himself drifting closer to the closet door with every minute that passed without the woman’s acknowledgement, or any other indication that she had come back to fulfill her promise.

To combat the increasing need to poke through the slated, sliding door, Sun pushed himself as far into the back wall as he dared. He had never been sure what would happen if he tried to leave the building through one of its solid walls; but he wasn’t about to find out now.

“…I’m back.”

Sun twitched when the muffled voice reached his ears, through the barrier of plaster and wood. He pressed further into the wall, instead of pulling himself out. Out of his periphery, he could see the textured surface framing his face, as if he had breached his head through a layer of water.

The woman’s first words weren’t quite the invitation he had been hoping for. Given what had happened the last time he had appeared before her unprompted, he was more than willing to wait for her to actually say she wanted him around.

He strained to hear for a sign of movement, in the quiet and the dim of the closet; but the woman didn’t speak again, and while he lingered, he began to think that maybe he should have taken her announcement as a cue to come forward—

The slated door slid open with a lingering creak, spilling light over the thin metal railing bolted across the space.

The woman stood in the entrance, with one hand pressed against the white wood.

In her other hand, she held tight to a heavy-looking black jacket. A large black t-shirt swathed her torso in its place, along with a pair of jeans which looked more distressed and faded than he would have considered to be fashionable. Though, he wasn’t quite up to date on the trends these days.

Her eyes darted to his almost immediately after she had cast light into the cramped, empty space. He fought not to shrink away from her scrutiny, even while her gaze hardened as she recognized his presence.

“Uh,” he said. The mumble was reflexive; he couldn’t stop the quiet syllable before it pushed past his lips.

Instead of addressing him, the woman reached out, and grasped onto one of the few plastic coat hangers which hung from the metal rod in front of him before placing her jacket onto it. It shielded her from his view, when she placed the hanger back where it had come from.

When the closet door remained open after she had finished, Sun assumed that was his opportunity to leave his hiding place.

He surfaced out from the wall slowly, dragging his chest out first, followed by his limp arms hanging at his sides. His legs lingered back, before he moved further forward, and pulled his feet through in silence.

He phased through the lone jacket in front of him, and finally— _finally_ — found himself face to face with his roommate.

The woman’s eyes darted over him in minuscule movements while he proceeded; her gaze was focused, narrowed, as though she were trying to study him without making the action obvious. He held himself as still as he could, while she looked at him. 

He wondered, yet again, what she saw. What she thought of him, of what had happened _to_ him, to leave him in such a state.

But when her attention darted towards his bare feet, she took a single step backwards, and away from him.

She didn’t even seem to know what she had done. The motion was fluid, almost practiced. Like an acquiescence she had given hundreds of times before, to hundreds of others before him.

He glanced down towards where her eyes had landed, and noticed that he was floating off the carpeted floor. 

His feet, his entire body lowered to press— or so he hoped— to the ground. He couldn’t feel the ground beneath his skin, but he kept descending until he reached a point where he would sink his toes into the carpet if he kept lowering. Finally, he leveled his feet to imitate what standing must have once been like, for him.

All the while, he kept his attention fixated on his feet. He could still feel the buzz of the woman’s attention on him while he moved; the attention felt unnatural. Impossible. Too good to be true.

It was everything he had wanted in the two days since he had learned that she could see him. To have that acknowledgement that he was still _real_ to someone. He hadn’t even know that had been possible, before that chance encounter.

But even with that, Sun couldn’t bring himself to look up and meet her eyes, yet. The last time he had done that without her permission, she had left.

She had left him.

The memory stung, almost as harshly as the sound of the door being slammed in his face. 

He knew it was wrong of him to think of that as a betrayal of some sort; he didn’t know her, regardless of how many times he’d pretended they were roommates, or how long he lingered in that empty closet. But he wanted to, so desperately; and the presence of that urge, that need to understand her, suddenly caused that strange, burning sensation to rekindle in his chest.

The silence permeated the small space between him and her, filling it like a physical presence. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her legs, and the place where her feet met the floor. 

He took in the sight of what a solid existence looked like, and waited to be told what he could do next. He couldn’t act too quickly; he had to force his feet to remain against the floor, even as the desire prompted his body to rise into the air. He didn’t think he could cope with watching her walk through the front door again.

“Come on,” the woman finally said. Her feet turned to the side, and a moment later, she was gone. 

Sun looked up to the space she had occupied, and was met with the bare expanse of the front door.

He slowly shuffled out of the closet, and turned his attention towards the hallway. A few steps away, the woman was entering the living room.

He moved further into the hall. His fingers curled into his palms, ever so slightly, when the woman settled into the couch by the opposite wall. She pressed into the corner of her seat, as though she were trying to make herself as small as she could.

As he approached, her head darted up from her lap. When her attention landed on him, he had to force himself to keep walking, instead of jumping into the air.

He eventually stopped at the arm of her seat, and stared down at her; as well as where she _wasn’t_. Because, where she usually would lay out across the entirety of the couch, the seat beside her was now left unoccupied.

He didn’t have any illusions that she had done that for him. Though he couldn’t stop himself from leaning towards it, as though he could make it into an invitation.

Instead, he moved to occupy a space on the empty floor in front of her. He lowered himself further to the ground, and imitated a cross-legged position on top of the surface to the best of his ability.

They stared at each other for a few moments, locked at an impasse in silent anticipation.

Sun shifted his tail across his legs; the last time he had done so, he recalled, the woman seemed to have relaxed her suspicion of him. He hoped it would work again this time around.

At the reminder of that occurrence, his eyes then rose to the top of her head, where the black ribbon was once again tied over the pair of ears she was hiding.

He couldn’t stop himself from wondering why that was. Even when he had been alive, he wasn’t able to recall an instance where he had felt the need to conceal his tail. Or, perhaps there had been one; he wasn’t too sure, now. All he remembered was that his tail set him apart from other people. He may not have ever considered that to be particularly important.

Maybe she felt differently. He didn’t know, but just like everything else about her, he wanted to.

As he stared at her, Sun realized that— if one knew what to look for—the woman’s ears _were_ noticeable, despite her best efforts. With his attention moving from her eyes, to her jaw, to her ears, he watched as the bow fluttered on top of her skull, as though a nonexistent breeze had shifted the fabric.

Shortly after the movement, the woman finally let a sigh escape her lips. She shut her eyes, and finally addressed him.

“I guess we’ll start with the basics. What’s your name?”

Sun twitched, the moment her eyes parted to look at him. He shifted, and straightened his back. His tail uncurled from his ankle, only to be replaced by his fingers a moment after. Her deadened stare remained fixed on him as he worked his jaw.

“My name’s Sun,” he finally introduced. He pointed at himself with his free hand. A moment later, he brought it behind his head, and smiled in a way he hoped was reassuring. 

The woman’s expression didn’t change, once he had finished. That wasn’t a great sign, he worried.

“…Last name?” she prompted.

Sun shrugged. “I…kind of don’t remember?” 

She blinked once, then twice, as though she didn’t believe that she had heard him right.

It was the truth, though. There was little which Sun remembered about himself, a puzzle with a majority of its parts missing from the board; though it seemed a couple of pieces had come back to him, in the two weeks since the woman had first arrived.

“You don’t remember.” When she repeated his admission, her voice was harsh, and flat.

Sun shrugged once again, trying to give an air of nonchalance to offset her suspicion.

“I know I had one,” he said. He glanced towards his bare feet, finally breaking away from looking at her, and having to see the way her bright eyes narrowed as he spoke. “I just can’t remember it.”

He heard the sound of her shifting in her seat, but didn’t look up to take in what her opinion of him might have been in that moment.

“How long have you been here?” she then asked.

“Ah…” Sun shrugged, and glanced towards the floor at his side. “Three years, I think?”

He thought that three autumns had passed since he had died, was what he meant. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that to her, though; that the time when the leaves began to fall had been one of his few true measures of time. It brought a strange, mournful sense to the forefront of his thoughts. He didn’t want to elicit that from her. So, he would keep it quiet, and hope that his explanation was enough for her.

The woman breathed in, heavily, shortly after he had spoken. He kept his attention fixed on the wiry threads of the carpet, instead of looking at her as he so wanted to.

“Ghosts can’t leave the place where they died…” Her voice was a low murmur, bordering on a whisper. It was a tone which suggested her words hadn’t been meant for his ears.

Sun glanced up, finally, when she spoke. 

How had she known that, he immediately wanted to ask. Was he not the first ghost she had encountered?

The woman flinched when his eyes fell on her, but she kept her attention on him all the same, holding his gaze more firmly than he had been expecting. So far, she had seemed like she had wanted to look anywhere but at him. 

He moved to seize that opportunity before she could look away from him again. “Yeah,” he said, hastily.

He didn’t stop after that; his mouth kept moving after that brief agreement, the words falling out like overflowing water from a basin. “I mean…when I try, there’s some kind of barrier that I disappear through. Kinda like my hand gets chopped off, or something.”

He held his arm out at his side, and with his other hand chopped at his wrist. He hoped that was enough to demonstrate the effect.

After a moment of the woman watching him, nonplussed with his mimicry, he lowered his arms.

“So…what’s your name?” Sun finally asked.

The woman’s brow ticked upward, disbelieving.

“You don’t know?” she asked. 

Sun scratched at the back of his head, and smiled sheepishly. “I did tell ya I stayed away whenever you were around. I didn’t want to intrude.”

The woman’s head tilted, just slightly, to the side. Her lips pursed as she seemed to gauge the truth of what he had said.

But it _was_ the truth. No matter how much he wanted to know her, he knew better than to invade her privacy more than he was by his mere presence, alone.

Whatever she was looking for, whether it be in his words or in his demeanor, she seemed to have come to some sort of conclusion. Her head moved back to being raised straight up, and he quietly took notice of how her shoulders seemed to loosen even further, while she took a quick breath.

“Blake,” she finally answered. 

Sun sat up straighter, once she spoke.

Then his smile grew, bursting out over his face before he could contain it. “It’s nice to meet you, Blake!” 

He couldn’t look away from her— from _Blake_ — as he said those words. As he finally greeted the person who had unwittingly given him everything he could have asked for and more. He couldn’t have looked away from her even if he had wanted to; and he couldn’t imagine wanting that.

When Blake’s expression softened into the first, gentle look she had directed at him since their first meeting, his smile widened further.

_Blake_ , he thought, repeating her name to himself. The syllables slotted in amongst the short amount of memories he had of her, settling gently over the images of her curled into that blue couch, or sitting alone on the back deck, like a blanket of snow.

_…_

_Blake._

…

That mere gesture, the show of trust from Blake in giving him her name, was a start. And after so long of living in a constant, changeless eternity, well…he was more than ready for something new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A much shorter chapter than what I've done so far; but I really love having bits of retrospection where I can explore the same scene or sets of scenes from another character's POV. Because this story is so Blake-centric, I especially wanted to get us relatively caught up on how Sun felt in the lead up to their first interactions; as well as a bit of foreshadowing about his past, from his perspective. We'll be back to the "present", and Blake's POV, in the next chapter.
> 
> Please, let me know what you think of this! Has the retrospective these last two chapters worked well? There may be more in the future which cover certain events from Sun's POV, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Or anything, really! This subject is quite ambitious since Blake and Sun can't interact in a traditional way. I'm more than glad to hear feedback on how I'm executing their development.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sun and Blake find out which of them is a trashy romantic.

**_Two weeks later_ **

The end of spring brought with it endless rainstorms and weak sunshine filtering through the thin, wispy blankets of smog and clouds which hung low over the flashing green and red tips of Atlas City’s endless skyscrapers. The air was beginning to warm, the trees in full flower with white petals just barely darkening to viridescence, which pushed the few frail, brown leaves which had clung to their branches throughout the winter down to the clean slate sidewalks.

As the world around them continued to lighten, the denizens of the city had begun to trade out their heavy, designer winter coats for looser clothing, light blazers and silken skirts replacing the stiff, oil-scented leather. Wherever they went, they were armed with black umbrellas and sunglasses to block out the alternating patterns of cascading water and merciless sunlight as they continued their never-ending trek throughout the cityscape.

In truth, even with the changing season, the city wasn’t much different from when it had still been held within the cusp of winter and early spring, with its gray skies and dark nights; it was still a study in severity, with its unending towers of rigid steel and glass, and still a hub of the wealthy and wicked while they drove in sleek cars and walked in priceless shoes. But to Blake, the perfectly-paved streets were beginning to feel like— if not something adjacent to comfort, safety, _home_ — something familiar.

She sat in the quiet and the dark, perched on the edge of her bed, as she listened to the quiet rumble of a car passing alone on the street outside the wall at her back. It was early morning, still, and she was conscious enough for the sun to have not yet crested the horizon, which still remained cold and distant and blue. To consider herself awake would have been a stretch; it was going to take more than opening her eyes for her to wake up to a point which resembled competency.

After a few moments of wondering whether she could justify returning herself to the warm comfort of her blankets, and long after the lone car had vanished into the night, she stood up. With a quiet groan she popped the stiffness in her spine, before padding towards the staircase opposite her with more than a little regret aimed at the chilled air touching her skin.

Midway down the stairs, her eyes darted down towards the darkened living room floor; instinctively drawn towards the splash of blue light which barely dusted the gray carpet. 

She paused as she was struck, momentarily, with the deja vu of a moment just like this, with her eyes searching the room for something that wasn’t supposed to be there. The difference laid in the fact that back then, she had been far more wary than she was now.

Through the sliding glass doors, her unwanted roommate sat with his back to the room. The broad line of his shoulders was pressed close to the clear surface. Had he been corporeal, the fabric of his white sweatshirt would have bunched and twisted against the glass; instead, it hung loose across his back, as if nothing solid were touching him at all. Her eyes then fell to his side, taking in the way his legs were stretched out in front of him, the way his length ended far too abruptly. Where his calves should have hung out over the rejuvenating grass, there was only empty air.

Blake watched Sun as his head remained tilted towards the night sky, remaining unaware of her presence. It was rare for her to have the opportunity to study his face when he thought he was alone. _Because he never leaves me alone_ , she thought, exasperated. But the difference in his demeanor was still astounding to her. The stillness of his profile, the relaxed line of his lips, were in stark contrast to the sheer abundance of energy he exuded when she was around him. The one slate eye that she could see remained fixed on the clouds, never shifting away from the darkened sky. 

She couldn’t help but think that it was a lonely sight. The blue light spilling out of him always marked him as something other, something that didn’t belong.

_More than his tail would have?_ A quiet voice, something not her own, hissed the notion low and deep in the back of her mind. She flinched away from the thought, and slowly counted out a minute. 

She never afforded pity for the dead. She couldn’t allow that rule to change simply because she was now living with a ghost. Her eyes remained on Sun’s back, with a furrow in her brow and a frown on her lips.

Once she had finished her count, she continued her descent into the lower floor of the apartment.

She had quickly begun to guess that there was something about Sun, something supernatural— aside from the obvious, of course— which heralded her presence to him before she could do it herself. There seemed to be little other explanation; as, no sooner had her feet touched down from the final step onto the floor, she caught a flicker of motion through the glass as Sun turned his head over his shoulder. He peered at her around the thin angle which just barely begun to hide him from her view.

Her eyes shifted away from him to avoid the delight which lit the dark gray in his eyes as he lifted himself up from his seated position. Blake moved on sluggish feet towards the kitchen space without acknowledging his presence.

“Morning!” Sun’s voice greeted, muffled through the layers separating him from her— apparently, the laws of physics still applied to him in some ways— and sounding far too cheerful for that time of day. She was still trying to blink sleep out of her vision, as it blurred her table and floor into mere smudges of gray and brown in front of her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Blake observed as he phased through the glass doors, with a hand raised to wave enthusiastically at her, moving so fast his fingers blurred beside his face. She watched his movements with slight interest, though she fought hard to push it away before it could soften the stiff set of her jaw.

As she took in the ease with which he acted around her, however, a wandering thought sent a jolt underneath her skin.

Somehow, without her notice or permission, three weeks had passed since their first clumsy, strained conversation. Two had gone by since they came to their shared “living” arrangements.

The irony of that phrase was not lost on Blake— but ever since Sun had blurted it out one evening, as she had been laid out on the couch reading from her newest novel and he had been sprawled on the floor, laying on his chest and paying a sliver of attention to the sports game playing out on the projector, she had to admit the description was growing on her. Sun, she was coming to find, had an unorthodox sense of humor.

But even though two weeks had gone by, it was still disconcerting to see, the image of a ghost sitting just outside her back door; and even more-so that he would turn to face her as she descended the staircase from the loft, his movements so sure as if he could simply sense her presence as she left her bed. He would float to his feet, and come inside to greet her without fail.

Blake blinked out of her musing when she realized Sun had fully entered into the living space, and had two feet pressed to the carpeted floor.

She continued to eye him without turning to face him fully, keeping him just within her periphery, as she thought of a way to respond to his warm salute.

She settled on a short nod before she turned her back on him, and moved towards the refrigerator. A yawn caught in her throat, and stubbornly stuck there, while she opened the door. She stared into the dim orange space, and the empty shelves within.

Her ears twitched in annoyance when she rescanned the thin glass surfaces, thinking that if she just kept looking, food would simply materialize in front of her.

When no such miracle occurred, she shut the door with a sigh, and moved towards the cabinets above the sink. She pulled out the dwindling box of tea leaves which sat alone on the lowest shelf, searched for a clean spoon and mug, and filled her kettle with water.

Though Sun possessed no physical presence, Blake could still sense that he was hovering at her back, like a shadow detached from her own body. Her ears flicked again, as she set the kettle onto the stovetop and clicked the burner to life.

For a moment, she stared at the container, watching the small blue flames curl over the bottom of the shining metal in mindless tendrils and swirls. Past them, she could see her distorted reflection in the surface, her form a mere smudge of pale skin and black hair captured in the scratches and dents.

There was a distinct lack of a blue glow illuminating the space over where she vaguely guessed her shoulder was. No blond hair to contrast against her darkness.

“Have you ever had tea before?” she asked suddenly.

It came out stilted, almost laden with uncertainty. She hadn’t meant for the question to go further than her own thoughts.

In the aftermath, the air remained still and calm. The water in the kettle was barely beginning to hiss, filling the buzz of silence with its undercurrent of noise.

She didn’t flinch when a white-clad shoulder settled at her side, standing only a foot away. A moment later, Sun bent forward to peer at the kettle.

When she turned her head to face his profile, she took in the firm puzzlement written into his furrowed brow, as he appeared to mull over her question in the quiet.

He looked strange, she thought, hunched over to get a closer look at the stove. She still couldn’t help but think that the intensity with which he was studying the kettle was somehow endearing. A smile fought valiantly to work its way across her lips as she studied him; she beat it back behind the firm wall she still maintained when she realized what it was trying to do.

It was a strange question to ask, she was sure. Tea was far from an unusual drink in Atlas, or really anywhere else in the world. But she figured it was a lot more significant, given Sun’s situation.

For a few more heartbeats, Sun stared steadfastly at the kettle. Blake watched him, and absently watched the swirling blue motes which hovered at the blurred edge of his form.

“I don’t remember,” Sun finally announced. He stood back to his full height, then met Blake’s eyes. A sheepish smile curled the edges of his mouth upward, and he glanced away from her before she could discern whether his eyes were smiling along with his lips. “What does it taste like?”

“There’s many kinds,” she said. The whine of the boiling water was growing louder between them, but it went ignored as she nodded towards the box of thin, deep green shreds. “So it’s hard to have a good answer for that.” 

She reached for the box, and went about filling the small infuser set beside it with the necessary amount of leaves.

“So what about this,” Sun asked. His finger jutted into her line of sight, aimed at the metal container and the spindly foliage she was putting into it.

“The kind I have?” She hummed as she thought it over. “Bitter, I suppose. But all teas taste different.” She continued scooping small amounts into the container as she thought over something as benign as the taste of tea. The subject dredged up more memories than she would have liked, as she thought of the same question being asked in a tinier voice, one which sounded distinctly like her own. She thought of the kind-faced man who had her eyes, who had taught her how to make it.

She shut the lid, both on the infuser and on the memories, once she was happy with the amount. It was just as well, as the kettle beside her began to shriek with its heat. She thought further on Sun’s question. “This is definitely bitter…but it kind of tastes like flowers, too.”

She glanced towards him as she moved towards the stove to shut off the flames. “That doesn’t help you understand, though.”

Sun didn’t seem to take offense to her last comment, judging by the grin which flashed across his face. “Not really. But your flowers help me picture it. They probably smell nice.”

Her eyes shifted towards the other end of the counter where, in the junction at which the surface turned to follow the wall of the staircase, her flowerpots sat in an eclectic pile of green shoots and multicolored petals. Some of the ceramic were the standard red-brown terra-cotta; others were painted baby blue. If they hadn’t been turned to face the corner, the letters “M.B.” looping across the surface in white paint would have been visible.

The collection had grown in the last couple of weeks, blossoming into a miniature garden growing ever larger across the waning space of her kitchen counters, courtesy of the boxes of pots Tai would bring into the office and leave on the counters in the break room for the workers to take home. If more than a few of them had been shoved into her arms by the man, she hadn’t protested it, even though the initials on the ceramic made her face turn warm with frustration.

She pointedly didn’t give any thought to who had provided those flowers to Tai yet, however. It was still too early in the morning to be dealing with the problems of the outside world. Instead, she set about finishing her tea, and waited for the leaves to properly infuse the water in silence.

Sun remained beside her while she stood with her back leaning against her kitchen table. His eyes on the side of her face felt hot, reminiscent of his namesake. She didn’t look at him until after she pulled the infuser from her drink and took her cup in hand to lead them both to the deck.

She opened the door while Sun silently slid past her, moving through the glass before she had finished parting it fully. By the time she had stepped onto the cool wood and shut the door behind her, he had already settled into a position at her side. His legs were pulled close to his chest, with his arms wrapped tight around his knees and his tail draped loosely over his bare feet.

When she sat down, she moved to face him fully, and leaned her shoulder against the glass. The cold seeped through the thick fabric of her deep gray sweatshirt, quickly cooling her arm in a sharp contrast against the steaming cup she held in both hands.

The pair of them often sat in silence, since they had started spending these mornings on the deck together. Blake preferred to watch the lightening sky with no distractions, or to read one of her books in peace. Sun didn’t seem to mind her solitary nature; it wasn’t like he had anything more pressing to do, and from what Blake was beginning to understand, he would sit alone on the deck when she would go to bed.

Her eyes eventually drifted away from his form, and the way his attention seemed to be focused on studying the tufts of fur covering his tail, to cast out over the tiny back garden of her apartment.

It was little more than a patch of grass. Hardly anything substantial, and it seemingly been recently mowed some time before she had moved in, judging from the short and blunt tops of the blades.

She recalled her landlord telling her she could plant things here; though she wasn’t quite sure what would grow in such a tiny place. As she looked out towards the wall which sat opposite of her, she spotted a thin line of light brown dirt, almost gray in the early morning shadows, which disturbed barred the grass from touching the cinderblocks.

Her mind supplied red petals and brown thorns suddenly, unbidden, in the minutes she spent staring at the empty plot and taking cautious sips of her tea.

She mused on the image, intrigued by the idea. Roses were hardy plants. The soil she had to work with likely wasn’t the greatest, but with enough coaxing, she could likely make them work.

A memory from her childhood surfaced from beneath the crimson leaves as she thought. A picture of the white-paneled house at the end of the street— of the garden that had been kept in the backyard. Shortly before she had left that place, it had flourished, with bright colors and healthy bushes to lighten the dull surroundings their neighbors neglected. She wondered if that garden was still there. If the hands which had tilled the soil still sifted through it now.

The thought stung worse than any thorn; she focused firmly on the solid wall in front of her, instead, and tried to imagine what it would look like if it were hidden behind a row of budding rose bushes.

“Do you like sweet things?” Sun asked, abruptly.

Blake didn’t startle, though his voice was an unpleasant reminder that she wasn’t alone with her memories. Her eyes slid off of the far wall, off of the imaginary roses she had planted there, to meet Sun’s eyes.

“No,” she answered, slowly. She shifted her cup in her hands as she felt her fingers growing too hot to be comfortable. “Not really.”

After a moment where Sun didn’t explain his reason for asking, she took the opportunity to bring it up. “Why do you ask?”

He tucked his chin close to his knee. “Those cookies on your counter,” he said.

Blake stiffened, slightly, as she pictured the plastic container, and the brown treats inside of it.

Sun continued, undeterred by her reaction. “You haven’t touched them, and they’re kind of past expiration. You keep bringing them with you when you leave here, but you always come back with them. I was curious since I didn’t think you would buy food and not eat it.”

She stared at him for a few breaths, a time in which she thought over the meaning of those cookies and what she would be willing to tell him. It seemed like this morning was just going to be one full of uncomfortable topics for her.

But he was right; she had bought those cookies two weeks ago, back when they had already been on sale due to their quickly approaching best-by date.

The problem wasn’t necessarily with her. It was largely— _solely_ , in fact— on the account that she hadn’t seen any sign of Ruby in the last fourteen days.

The girl had been nowhere to be found at Patchwork, ever since Blake had left the Xiao-Long residence. At first, she had only assumed that it was because Ruby didn’t actually work at the shop, but instead spent most of her free-time there. She likely had other commitments. But as the days had worn on, quickly becoming a week before Blake had known it, she guessed that Ruby wasn’t so busy that she couldn’t even stop by for an hour in the afternoon, as she had sometimes done when Blake had first started working at the auto shop.

_“It’s just a weird time of year for her,”_ Yang had told her the previous week, when they had taken their lunch together in the break room behind the front office. Blake had finally worked up the courage to ask about the young girl, however tentatively her voice may have been as she waited for a rebuke. The box of cookies she had been bringing into work every day, only to take home every evening, had sat on the table between them like a forgotten offering. _“Just give her some time.”_

But it had hardly been a fight, she had thought; a terse disagreement, sure. A brief standoff over Blake’s opinion on someone Ruby apparently considered her friend, but Blake didn’t think it was something worth avoiding her for two weeks over.

She had eventually, reluctantly elected to believe Yang’s final words on the matter, spoken as she had gotten up to leave the break room: “ _Besides, she hasn’t been avoiding_ you _. And she’s busy at Myrtle. Weiss’s been short-staffed the last couple weeks.”_

Blake scowled at the memory of that name in Yang’s low voice, but her expression smoothed out quickly when she noticed Sun’s brow quirk into an unspoken question.

She took a sip of her tea, and a quiet breath, before she spoke.

“They’re supposed to be for a friend,” she explained. She looked down into the dark red drink she held, staring into the minuscule ripples caused by her hold on her mug, and the distortion of her reflection looking up at her. “Her name’s Ruby. We left on bad terms the last time I saw her. I don’t really know what kind of food she likes, but I got them to try and…make things up, I guess.”

Sun blinked, and remained silent.

Blake wasn’t sure why that felt like a prompt for her to continue speaking, but she took the opportunity he presented regardless.

“I haven’t seen her in awhile, though. I doubt they’re any good now.”

Sun stayed quiet while she glanced up from her drink to study his reaction. His eyes remained on her, clear and bright with the Faunus trait of infra-vision which had followed him into death.

“What caused you guys to fall out?” he then asked.

Blake took another sip of her drink, finishing the last remaining puddle which had collected at the bottom of her mug, in order to delay her answer.

“She’s friends with someone who…I wouldn’t be able to get along with,” she said. Her eyes lifted from the stained ceramic to gauge Sun’s reaction to her words.

When her attention landed on him, she realized he looked like he wanted to laugh, with his lips pursed and curled upward; but the humor didn’t reach his eyes, where they were shuttered at her words.

“Seems kind of stupid to get in a fight because of who someone’s friends with,” he mused, his voice light and damning at the same time.

Blake flinched, but her expression fell into a scowl despite his subtle critique. She didn’t think she and Ruby were _fighting_ , necessarily— but the longer Ruby spent away, the more she thought that at least one of them had a different idea of the situation. And beside that, Sun didn’t understand that the _who_ in this situation wasn’t just _anyone_.

She decided to find out if he would get it. “Does the name ‘Schnee’ sound familiar to you?”

Sun shook his head, his eyes dull and unaware of the meaning behind that name.

She knew it was a long shot, given what little else he seemed to remember about the outside world, but it had been worth a try regardless.

“They’re a family that’s prominent in the Dust business,” she began. Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth while she thought of the glowing, multicolored crystals. “Mining, refining, and distributing. They’re the largest suppliers in the world, and one of the richest families in the country.

“They’re well-known for their horrible working conditions and their lack of good pay. But that doesn’t really matter to them. Or the fact that a majority of their workers are Faunus.” Her lips curled into a sneer as she spoke, unwittingly.

“It’s an open secret. Their mines have accidents every few months, one of their warehouses go up in flames every once in a while, or someone comes out with a story about how bad the conditions are in the places that don’t explode.”

Her fingers tightened around her empty cup.

“The Schnee Dust Company,” she spoke the title like a curse, like the words were acid on her tongue, “has more than enough money to bribe anyone who could do anything about it to look the other way. And no-one important cares enough about the workers to change anything.”

Sun’s eyes shifted up towards her uncovered ears, before returning to meet her stare.

“And your friend’s friend is a Schnee,” he surmised.

Blake nodded.

“The daughter of the CEO,” she amended. “She’s been the top pick to take over his position once he retires since she was a child.”

As Sun looked at her, she could nearly picture the puzzle pieces she had given him, slotting together one by one inside his head. She wondered what the picture looked like to him; to her, it was only the image of that damned, twelve-pointed snowflake. “So then, how does your friend know the princess?” he eventually asked.

She held back a smirk as that sardonic title fell off Sun’s tongue with ease.

It was a very good question, however. And one which Blake still didn’t fully have the answer to, as much as it rankled her to know that Weiss had seemingly been gone from her position as heiress for far longer than she could justify being ignorant of.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Apparently she’s been running a flower shop for the last three years. That’s how my friend and her family know her.”

Sun glanced towards the doors at their side. His eyes darted in the direction of the kitchen counters, where Blake knew the blue flowerpots were lined up and their logos hidden from view.

“Maybe she got bored of the high life and quit,” he offered, as his eyes found hers once again.

Blake fought the urge to scoff at the suggestion. “That doesn’t make it any better,” she muttered. Not everyone had that choice, that easy decision to _just leave_. She knew that all too well.

Sun shrugged. “Maybe not,” he agreed, “but it’s gotta mean something that she’s not hanging out with her dad, right? If he’s that bad, you’d think she’d be just like him. But it sounds to me like she doesn’t want to be involved.”

He had a point.

Rationally, she _knew_ it was significant that someone like Weiss Schnee was walking the streets of Mantle with no paparazzi tailing her. With no plain-clothes security guards shadowing her store. With friends like Ruby and Yang and Tai so casually accepting her into their fold. She couldn’t imagine a main-branch Schnee simply wandering around without some sort of protection; or what it would take for that protection to be revoked.

She knew that the Schnees were well aware of the consequences for complacency. In another life, she had been the one to help deliver them.

But none of those thoughts were enough to stop the uneasy churn in her stomach, whenever she thought of the white-haired woman and her shop full of sweet-smelling flowers.

“I guess,” she relented, not bothering to hide how unconvinced she was as she spoke.

Before Sun could respond, however, she glanced towards her Scroll at her hip, and tapped the cracked surface in order for the projector to illuminate with the time, telling her she only had a few minutes before she had to leave for work. At some point, the dark sky above their heads had shifted into the muted pinks and golds of morning, giving her another excuse to leave this conversation.

“I’ve got to get ready,” she announced. She didn’t wait for Sun’s answer before she stood, Scroll and mug in hand, and moved to open the back door.

Sun was silent at her back, seemingly content to remain where he was while she made her exit. And as she left him alone on the deck, she couldn’t stop herself from feeling as though he were analyzing her; her skin prickled to think of what it was he could have been finding. She shut the glass door as if that would be enough to cut the prickling sensation off.

It followed her well after her apartment had disappeared in the rearview mirror of her car.

..:|:..

The flower boxes bordering the sidewalk outside of Patchwork were filled with flowers in their waning bloom, the purple and pink tulips just beginning to droop and wither under the harshening sun, the vibrant yellow daffodils wilting into pale brown petals. In their places, bursts of marigolds and fierce orange-red daylilies were coming to life to bask in the warming air.

Blake shut the door of her rusted red vehicle with a firm slam and a soft sigh. Her eyes dragged over the empty parking lot, slowly adjusting to the reflection of the sun off the black tar which snaked across the concrete. Then, empty-handed, she navigated the cracked and deformed pavement towards the front office.

She opened the faded door, barely paying attention to the whining creak the uncoiled hinges made upon her entry. She breathed in the acrid smell of oil and metal, the faint redolent scent of the papers still stacked to waist-height, and stepped over the dark threshold.

As the first person to arrive at the shop, Blake had quickly taken on the responsibility of handling the tasks involved with opening up. She began her duties after only a quick perusal of the paperwork still stacked high throughout the room. Given the good weather the day seemed to be bringing with it, she went into the garage and opened all nine of its doors, allowing the golden morning sun to spill across the stained concrete floor.

At some point, she had also given herself the task of organizing the tools for the mechanics before they got in to work. They had a chaotic sense of organization, an unspoken system which they understand but was entirely foreign to her. Drawers filled with wrenches and bolts were seemingly easily interpreted by those who knew how to use such things, but Blake’s hackles had prickled at the disorderly sights the first time she had laid eyes on them.

To her surprise, Taiyang was the worst offender. Because of that, it _wasn’t_ surprising whenever she would hear him loudly ask where his vacuum pump had gone for the third time in a week. And so, she had begun to make sure to track down anything that had his name written on it and to put them on top of the rolling tool chests which lined the wall beside the windowed door which led into the office.

From there, she went around to the side of the building to retrieve the long, green hose attached to the lone water faucet, and set about hauling its length across the parking lot towards the flowerbeds.

As she pulled valiantly, she watched the woman who still remained outside one of the abandoned buildings which bordered the shop, keeping her at the corner of her sight while she worked.

Blake had never seen the woman leave the place she occupied. That place, at the edge of the walkway which led from the street towards the building’s staircase, where she stared down towards the street below her bare feet. Where she dipped her toes towards the concrete, and watched her flesh vanish into the invisible void.

She was continuing with her routine, unaware of her audience, as Blake continued to struggle with the deceivingly-heavy tube. There was nothing out of the ordinary with the experience, as she subtly observed the nameless shadow who never left the curbside. It was no different than any other day; she lowered her foot, it disappeared, she pulled back. She started again.

Blake knew what happened when a ghost tried to leave the place they had died. When they tried to move beyond the invisible, supernatural boundaries which confined them. She was more familiar with the dead, and those rules which pertained to them, than she ever wanted to admit.

**_“Don’t go!”_ **

With all the intrusiveness of a siren wailing down an empty street, that voice screamed out again, loud enough to jar her bones. 

The memory always did. It seemed she could never fully abandon it, no matter how hard she tried.

Now, however, it didn’t draw up the thought of telephone poles, and red skies. It made the memory of Sun laid out on her deck that morning flash to prominence.

It wasn’t an unordinary occurrence; the sight of his legs ending unnaturally short of where they should have, disappearing entirely up to his knees, was to be expected. She had afforded the sight with what little attention a mind fogged with sleep could afford, and yet…

And yet, what? She wasn’t sure why it was so surprising to her, as she stared towards the invisible woman with widened eyes. Why the thought of Sun’s legs vanishing into the void emerged at the sight of this long-dead person who listlessly, cyclically, stared at the street and made her limb disappear like air. Why it was, seemingly, so important.

A quiet murmur rose up in her thoughts, carrying the answer to her questions with it.

Blake pushed it back before she could listen to what it had to say. Not giving it the opportunity to resurface, she forcibly jerked her attention away from the shadow, before the woman could catch on to the fact that she had company who could see her. She went back to her goal of tugging the hose the remaining distance to the planter boxes along the sidewalk. And if she pulled a little more forcefully than before, she refused to acknowledge it.

The frustration remained, however. She had paused— only for a breath, but she had hesitated.

Even once she had returned back to the faucet and turned the knob to let the water spray out from the hose, and walked the distance back to begin watering the blooming flowers, Blake couldn’t get the image of Sun’s vanishing legs out of her thoughts.

She shook her head to clear the shadow of the man out of her mind.

Once she was finished with the boxes, she brought the hose over to the hanging baskets which were dangling from the spaces between the garage doors, and quickly set about spraying the vines and leaves which spilled out from the wicker and straw containers. By the time she had moved to the last basket, a rumbling blue pickup truck was quickly approaching down the street.

Blake dropped the hose to the pavement, and went to turn off the water. She tugged the tube around the side of the building, coiling it back into its holder bolted into the dirt-speckled wall, before returning to the front of the building. By the time she had done so, the truck had parked in the single spot set beside the office door, and she was greeted by the sight of Tai leaning against the driver’s side door.

“Morning,” he called out. Blake wiped her hands on her black jeans in a pitiful attempt to dry the water off her skin, but nodded her own greeting at her boss nonetheless.

She glanced towards the open garage, and saw a flash of blonde hair disappearing into the car yard behind the building. There was no sight of a dark pixie cut, or silver eyes, to be found.

With seemingly another day of not resolving whatever problem she had with Ruby ahead of her, Blake followed Tai as he went into the office through the garage, and put the thought of the cookies on her countertop out of her mind.

..:|:..

Blake had only been at Patchwork for a couple of hours before her day took a sharp, and certainly unexpected turn.

She had been sorting through paperwork in the front office, situated at the lone desk in the center of maelstrom, with Yang lounging in the chair against the wall beside the door leading into the garage. The girl was taking an extended break from helping Blake with her work, having started it well over half an hour ago with the promise of, “I’m just gonna take a ten minute break!”

And thus, she had been left alone in the office. So far, she had been lucky that no customers had come in and disrupted her quiet solitude.

That changed when the front door creaked open and the bell above the doorway chimed. She didn’t look up from her work at the quiet ring of metal.

The sharp click of shoes against pavement became a softer sound as whoever was entering the office padded slowly into the room. As the bell above the entryway continued to chime, the door was quietly shut.

She continued to read through her papers for a few breaths, waiting for the person to ask her if she could help them with something.

“Oh. I didn’t realize you’d be here,” a cool voice drawled.

Blake’s eyes snapped up from the sales report she had been scanning at the sound of it.

Weiss Schnee stood in the center of the open floorspace, still lined on either side by mountains of papers and files.

The crisp white dress she wore stood out against the baby blue blazer she wore atop it. Her beige-colored high heels were pristine; a state which wouldn’t last long, if she ever deigned to step into the chaotic garage on the other side of the wall. 

Blake was willing to bet all of her savings that the woman would rather die than do that, however. 

Around her neck, a necklace of rose-gold chains and pale blue gems hung loosely, glimmering in the weak fluorescent light coming from the ceiling, and Blake had little doubt that those small rocks were worth more than her entire paycheck.

Silently, she wondered if the universe had decided to drop Weiss in front of her because of the conversation she and Sun had partaken in— because of the way his scrutiny still clung, stubbornly, to the back of her mind like glue. 

It was becoming increasingly more common for him to haunt her, even when she wasn’t in her apartment. She kept her face smooth with the emergence of that thought, even while she cursed the circumstance she was now thrown into.

While Blake studied the heiress, the woman in question was staring around the room as though she had expected there to be more to it than what she found. A small sneer creased the corners of her nose.

Blake returned back to her work once she was finished with her appraisal. 

That didn’t last long, however, as she soon turned her attention again towards the newcomer, who was staring at her with a curious look in her ice-blue eyes.

“Blake, wasn’t it?” she asked a moment later.

Blake wished she could say it wasn’t, but that wouldn’t be a very polite thing to do. And unfortunately, the last thing she needed to do at that time was to make a social faux pas against a Schnee, no matter how estranged the woman may have been from her family.

“Yes,” she replied. “It’s good to see you again.”

The lie stung on her tongue, but she hid its bite with an impassive nod, instead of letting the sarcasm color her tone.

“Likewise,” Weiss said, though the word sounded just as strained in her mouth as Blake’s had in hers.

They fell into a silence thick enough Blake thought it was going to smother her. Her eyes fell back to her papers, drifting over the finances and reports. She went about setting the papers into her “recycle” pile without taking account of whether the information was currently relevant to the business. 

She could always fix that later. Right now, she needed to look busy.

It seemed to be working, as the room remained silent aside from the sound of shuffling papers. Though, it was not fully as she intended; Weiss still remained on the other side of the desk.

It was enough to set Blake’s teeth on edge, being so close to someone of Weiss’s reputation, though she successfully kept her mouth shut while she went about the illusion of her work.

Thankfully, Weiss didn’t seem to notice her turmoil, and after another beat of staring at one another, the woman focused her attention on haughtily eying the stacks of papers and folders littering the office floor. Blake couldn’t exactly blame her for the reaction. She was similarly vexed that, despite three weeks of straight paperwork, it didn’t look like she had made a dent in any of mess which still dominated much of the space in Patchwork’s front office.

Still, she didn’t appreciate the heiress of the SDC coming into her office and judging the chaos that she was responsible for organizing into a semblance of order.

She quickly returned back to focusing on her work, so she wouldn’t accidentally ask for the reason why Weiss had decided to show up, if all she was going to do was huff and sneer at the lack of organization in a place she didn’t even work at.

The quiet still lingered like a shadow between them, as she continued to flip through folders and set them aside into the various piles she had designated based on their relevancy and importance. The mindless, rote movements helped her to ignore the chilly stare which kept darting back to try and catch her eye.

The sound of papers flipping filled the room for several minutes— hours, perhaps, Blake wouldn’t have been surprised, given the storm clouds she could feel hovering over her head. She waited as long as she could manage before the weight became too much, before her eyes shifted once more over to where Weiss remained standing, stock still, in the center of the room.

She set down the stack of reports she was holding onto the crowded desk, and raised her head to finally, fully meet Weiss’s attention over the top of the screen in front of her. The woman had been trying to be discreet in her blatant staring; something which Blake was fully aware of.

“Can I help you with anything?” she asked, keeping her voice as even as she could.

Weiss’s shoulders jerked, nearly imperceptibly; her eyes had drifted down towards Blake’s hands at some point during their standoff, but they darted up to meet her gaze once she spoke.

“I’m here to say hello to Yang and her father,” Weiss said, in lieu of an answer. “I was in the area. Where…”

She trailed off as Blake tilted her head to the side, towards the door which led into the garage. “Yang went outside a few minutes ago.”

A few minutes ago, half an hour…it didn’t mean much of a difference to Blake, so long as the woman _came back_ to finish what she said she was going to do. So far, it didn’t look like that was going to happen any time soon.

Weiss nodded, looking distinctively bemused at whatever she was finding in Blake’s expression. She didn’t move towards the direction Blake had given right away, choosing instead to continue staring at her from her place across the desk.

Blake stared right back. 

At the top of her skull, the bow in her hair did not so much as twitch under other woman’s scrutiny.

“So…” Weiss drew the word out slowly. If Blake hadn’t grown up watching the girl on her projector screen, she would have labeled it as awkward; but she knew a Schnee wouldn’t have been caught dead without their social graces. 

Weiss rocked back onto one heel before she continued, and didn’t once look away from Blake’s shuttered stare. “How are you liking it here?”

Blake blinked at the unassuming question. Shortly after she cast her eyes, briefly, to the papers in front of her.

She looked back up before she couldn’t muster the strength to do it. “It’s fine,” she replied. “Tai’s a good boss. I don’t have any complaints.”

“You’ve only been in town for a month, right?” A single ivory brow quirked over a scarred blue eye as Weiss asked her next question.

Blake felt her own furrow when she wondered how Weiss would possibly know that. She hadn’t exactly been forthcoming when they had met in Myrtle Boutique, two weeks ago.

“Almost,” she corrected. “I moved in about three weeks ago.”

Three weeks, and already she had a ghost for a roommate, a manager who treated her more like a family friend than a stray he’d picked up off the street, as well his daughters who were far too friendly for their own good, and had met the heiress of the company who had been Blake’s mortal enemy for as long as she could remember.

Some things were just too strange to be true, she thought, as she stared at the silver line which traced down Weiss’s eyelid.

Meanwhile, Weiss hummed with quiet acceptance, and bobbed her head a few times as though she had expected that answer. “Well, Ruby can’t speak your praises enough. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’ve been best friends for years.”

Blake blinked, as she registered the name in Weiss’s voice. 

“Ruby?” 

She asked as though she had never heard it before. For some reason, she couldn’t picture what Weiss had described, not when the girl had seemingly been avoiding her for the last two weeks.

Weiss’s lips parted, presumably to answer the question, but she was interrupted by the door leading from the garage swinging into the room with a bang, followed by the whirring and grinding of tools and drills which was always a dull roar through the thin wall.

Both women looked towards the doorway in time to see Yang stride in, wiping her hands on a navy towel so stained with oil that its fibers looked more black than blue. Her hair remained wild and unbound behind her back, and she shook her head to clear a few wandering strands from her eyes as she moved.

Yang’s attention briefly darted to look at Blake with an apologetic grin already gracing her features, before she turned her attention towards their surprise guest. Her eyes widened, and she forcefully shoved the towel into a front pocket of her khaki pants.

“Hey there, snow angel!” she exclaimed. With two long steps, she weaved between the stacks of folders which lined the floor, and reached to pull Weiss into a one-armed hug.

Weiss primly dodged the attempt, her nose wrinkling once again into a slight sneer. “ _Not_ while you’re covered in grime,” she snapped. 

The words, much to Blake’s surprise, had very little bite despite the woman’s firm expression.

Yang didn’t seem troubled by the denial, as she crossed her arms over her chest. “We haven’t seen you around here in forever,” she said, before glancing over to Blake. 

Blake, who pointedly glanced towards the papers scattered across her desk, before returning to meet Yang’s eyes. 

The blonde’s sheepish look made a reappearance with her scrutiny, before she held her hands up to display the dark stains on her palms and fingertips as if to say, _Whoops, can’t help you now_.

She fought back the urge to roll her eyes, and picked up the stack she had been working on before Weiss’s arrival. With any luck, she might be able to get it sorted before her lunch break; not that it really made a dent in the rest of the mess in the office space.

The women in front of her went about their bickering as she sorted through a small number of financial reports, sales contracts, and other miscellaneous paperwork, before a hand waved just above her head, fingers wiggling to catch her attention.

When she looked up, she was met with clear blue eyes.

She nodded at Tai once she registered who he was, before she looked over at the girls. Yang was seemingly trying to get Weiss to take her arm, something which the other woman was vehemently protesting as she swatted at Yang’s outstretched fingers. 

She looked over towards the garage door, wondering how she hadn’t heard Tai’s entry. He chuckled softly as Weiss’s voice rose higher, “Get away from me, grease monkey!” 

“You haven’t heard from Ruby recently, have you,” Tai asked, his voice quiet underneath the lighthearted bickering happening beside him.

What was it with people and asking her about Ruby today, she wondered?

She shook her head quickly, and Tai hummed low.

At his back, Yang drifted over towards the lone armchair in the room after Weiss proved too stubborn to give in to her demands. Weiss followed in the blonde’s wake.

“It’s not my business to get involved in whatever’s going on with you two,” said Tai, his voice quiet under the muted thuds and whirs of the garage. “But I don’t get the impression that you’re upset with her.”

“I’m not,” Blake said, immediately. She wondered how she gave off that suggestion, and when; had it been that strained car ride back to Ruby’s home? The time Blake had spent locked up in Ruby’s room, avoiding the girl only so she didn’t have to picture the easy banter she had with the Schnee heiress?

Tai shrugged. “I figured that. It’s just a strange time of year for her. All of us, really. I just didn’t want you to think she’s upset at you.”

It reminded Blake of what Yang had told her, when she had asked after her half-sister. _“She hasn’t been avoiding_ you _.”_

Blake briefly looked back towards Tai as she took in his assurance, before nodding. She was tempted to ask him what a strange time meant; both he and Yang had referenced that, when they had talked to her about their youngest family member. However, his eyes drifted away from her once she had acknowledged what he had said, and he took a moment to stare in Weiss’s direction.

When Tai glanced back at her, she could almost hear his voice inside her head, urging her to give Weiss a chance.

She slowly slid her attention away from him, and back towards the girls.

Yang was laid out across the armchair, her legs hanging off one arm, and both her arms spread out on either side of her across the other. Weiss was leant against the closed door, arms crossed and with a lax look crossing her features as she listened to the blonde woman listening off what seemed to be various local restaurants.

As Blake watched the exchange unfold, she found that her attention kept drifting back to the heiress, who looked far more at home standing in the chaotic office of a hole in the wall auto shop than she ever had at the center of a press conference. 

It was a stark contrast from how she had always pictured the girl with the world handed to her on a silver platter. From the images she had seen of the straight-backed, silent heiress who had stood in her father’s long shadow at news conferences. 

“Hey, Blake,” Yang called. 

Blake turned her attention towards the blonde, who gestured up at Weiss with two fingers. “We’re gonna go grab some lunch.”

Her brow furrowed as she wondered what that had to do with her. 

After a beat, Weiss sighed, an exasperated sound which drew Blake’s eyes over to her.

“Would you care to join us?” she asked, in a manner which implied she already expected what the answer would be.

Somewhere inside her head, a voice was screaming at her that it was a ruse, a ploy; a Schnee would never debase herself so much as to mingle with people like Yang and Tai. It had to have been for optics. Rubbing elbows with the working class would do wonders to make the public forget about whatever incident was rocking the SDC that month. A Schnee would never turn their back on the _family business_ otherwise.

Worst of all, the voice continued, if Weiss ever learned Blake’s secrets— her past, all the things she had done, all the things she never wanted to think about again— she could expect to never see the outside of a prison cell. The woman may not seem to be involved in her family’s empire, but even she wouldn’t be able to overlook the things Blake refused to dwell on.

The voice in her head was low, and hoarse with spite, just as it had sounded in real life. Its memory sent a shiver running down her spine.

“Sure,” she finally said. Her own voice, hardly wavering in the aftermath of the memory, was barely enough to chase away the chill.

However, as a warm smile lifted the corner of Weiss’s mouth in response to Blake’s acceptance, she wondered if there was a possibility that she was wrong about one Schnee in particular.

..:|:..

“…and then Yang asked Weiss if she had ever had anything spicer than black pepper. Weiss said no. Her face almost went red when she tried the noodles Yang dared her to eat.”

Blake waved her fork in the air, as if that were enough to emphasis the absurdity of what she was explaining. The dish Yang had gotten had barely been anything. Blake had been given hotter things when she was a toddler; Weiss, apparently, had not been afforded that same development.

Across from her, Sun looked very much engrossed in her description of her day.

She stuck her utensil into her reheated chicken once she had finished with her description, still picturing the invisible steam that had come out of Weiss’s ears when she had scrambled for her water, as she, Blake, and Yang had sat in the corner of _Dang Good Foods_ , a restaurant only a few minutes walk away from Patchwork.

“It sounds like you two got along well,” he eventually said, after waiting for a few moments to watch her in the quiet. 

Blake glanced up from her reheated dinner to meet his stare. 

He was doing a fairly good job of imitating what sitting at the table would have been like, had he been alive. She hadn’t pulled out the opposite chair in order to help the illusion, but with the way he was hovering at her seated height, with his elbow held above the surface as though he were propping his arm up for his chin to rest on the heel of his palm, she could hardly tell that he wasn’t a solid figure.

Well, the blue glow didn’t help his case, either, but she was getting more comfortable with tuning that sight out of her immediate attention.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “It wasn’t too bad.”

Sun smiled as she spoke.

For a few moments, she pushed her food around in the dish in front of her, basking in the quiet which was light enough to be comfortable.

“So…how was your day, then,” she eventually asked. Stiltedly so— it was such a _domestic_ thing to be inquiring over— but she was in a good enough mood to pretend that asking a ghost how his day had been wasn’t the strangest thing she had done in the past decade.

“Oh,” Sun said. He sounded like he hadn’t expected her to care about his own existence, but the surprise quickly drained away from his expression. “It was good! There was a movie on just before you came home about a dog, and his owners. Uh, one was a news reporter I think. But I only paid attention to the dog.” Sun smiled as he spoke. “The dog kept destroying the people’s house. It was kind of cute! Though that would probably be annoying in real life. And it was kind of sad at the end when they had to put him down.” 

“Hm,” was all Blake said, as she finished the last of her food. Then she continued, thinking that her response sounded too disinterested, “It sounds interesting.”

She had never had much interest in movies, growing up. Sun’s presence in the apartment meant that she spent more time with her projector screen turned on than she guessed she had in her entire life. To be fair, it wasn’t as though there was much else she could provide him to help alleviate the apparent boredom of the afterlife.

When she got up to wash her dishes, Sun remained at the table. She could feel his presence at her back as she rinsed out the plastic container that her dinner had been packaged in, before she set it and her fork aside to dry out. 

“I’m going to go read for a bit,” she announced, turning back to meet Sun’s inquisitive stare. He rose up from his pretend seated position, and drifted out of her way while she moved to walk behind the chair he had been hovering in.

“Alright!” Sun seemed like he didn’t need any urging to move for the back deck. As he left, she noticed how he forewent imitating walking, in favor of simply floating forward with his toes just barely brushing within the thin carpeted floor.

Blake watched him leave for a moment, before she thought of the two activities she had only ever seen him partake in. Laying on the couch, watching imaginary worlds through the projector; sitting on the deck, watching the clouds pass him by.

“You can join me if you don’t want to be by yourself,” she offered. The words rushed out quickly, as though trying to escape her mouth before she could clamp it shut to stop them.

Sun’s feet fell through the floor as he, for lack of a better way for her to describe it, stumbled to a halt. He spun quickly, his tail whipping around the back of his leg, before he focused on her.

She crossed her arms, and glanced towards the staircase.

It took a couple of moments, far longer than she was comfortable with, for Sun to answer.

“Sure!” he said. 

Blake went upstairs in silence, while Sun floated through up towards, and through, the kitchen wall. By the time she stepped into the loft, he was hovering over the end of her bed, close to the desk which was crammed between the foot and the opposite wall of the room.

A small, tan bookshelf had been pressed tight against the table and the glass railing which barricaded the loft space, when she had first moved in. With only two shelves in total, it possessed only a handful of both hard- and soft-cover books scattered over the top row.

At first, her fingers trailed over the black spine of a thin novel, running over a thin red line which spanned across the width at the top, then towards the minimalist red heart which was emblazoned in the center, before she forewent that embarrassing choice in favor of a more acceptable option.

“ _The Thief and the Butcher_ ,” Sun read aloud, as she pulled the gray book off of the shelf. She turned her head to see that he was floating almost upside down, with his chin just barely remaining above her shoulder.

“It’s one of my favorites,” Blake said quietly, as she eyed the cover. The image of a man was emblazoned there, his face taking up the majority of the surface, along with the great, curving ram horns framing his golden eyes.

She nestled the book into the crook of her arm before she swept her attention over her paltry collection of books. She hadn’t brought many with her when she had moved in; before this, she had been living out of her car, out of motels. Books were always a luxury she had rarely been able to afford, until now.

“Are there any here that you might be interested in reading?” she offered. 

Sun somersaulted in the air so his legs were pointed down, before he swiveled to stare at the shelves of books laid out for his perusal. He slowly fell as he looked, as if drawn to the floor by the gravity which he could not feel.

“How am I going to do that?” he wondered aloud. As if to demonstrate his plight, he raised his arm and chopped it down, through the top of the bookshelf.

Blake’s ears perked at the top of her skull as she realized that he made a very good point.

“I can turn the page for you, if you want,” she offered. 

Sun hummed quietly at the suggestion, and turned to study her paltry collection more closely.

After a moment, his finger stuck out towards a light purple book, only slightly thicker than the one she had chosen. “What about this one?” he asked.

Blake reached for it, and pulled it out from underneath another book it had laid beneath. On the cover, a large, three petaled flower, with petals of deep purple and a yellow center, was visible. 

She turned the book over so Sun could read the synopsis; she couldn’t quite remember the premise of the book herself, either.

He moved to look at what she offered without asking what she was doing, shifting close enough that the blue haze which hovered around the fibers of his sweater illuminated her black sweatshirt.

“ _Violet’s Garden_ ,” Sun read loud. “ _After a bad relationship deterred Violet Olson from seeking new love, she finds herself in an awkward situation when she is involved in a case of mistaken identity._ _Doing her best to repress her growing feelings, Violet is seemingly rejected by_ _—_ ”

He looked up as Blake pulled the book away to hide it from his view. She slapped her hand over her face in an attempt to hide the fierce warmth she could feel spreading underneath her skin, not that it did her much good. A smile had been growing on his lips as he spoke, thought it only came into full bloom once he met her eyes.

There was a reason she didn’t want to remember the premise of the book, it would seem.

“I didn’t take you for a romantic,” he teased, and leaned forward as if he were trying to continue reading the synopsis.

She wasn’t going to tell him that more of her books were romance novels than not.

“I don’t usually read books like that,” she muttered.

Sun nodded along, though he didn’t look convinced. “I get it. Sometimes, trashy novels were the only thing to get me through the day. Like comfort food,” he said lightly.

Blake’s expression went lax as she realized what Sun said, her hand falling away from her face so he could see her surprise fully. “You remember that?” she asked. 

It was the first time he had sounded so certain about something from his lifetime. The confidence in his voice reverberated through her like electricity, an unfamiliar sensation that prickled under her skin.

Sun blinked, before his eyebrows rose quickly towards his hair. He didn’t seem to have registered what it was he had said either, until she had acknowledged it. 

“I guess so?” He didn’t seem very convinced by his own words. “That just…kind of came out.”

Blake stared at him for a few more moments. He looked back, unflinching under her scrutiny, and the awed expression on his face slowly died away into something distinctly more morose. 

She moved to put the book back on the shelf, with the hope of finding him something else to look at.

“No!”

She paused, and looked up just as she had rested _Violet’s Garden_ back onto the shelf. At her side, Sun was reaching for the purple-covered book. 

He pulled his arm back once he had her attention. “I want to read that one,” he said. Asserted, even. 

Blake’s eyes darted towards it before she grimaced. 

“Do you?” she asked, “or do you just want to make fun of me for my poor taste in romance books?”

Sun grinned. “Can the answer be both?”

Blake rolled her eyes, but obliged in taking the book back in hand, before she crossed the room to her bed.

“Come on,” she muttered, and placed Sun’s chosen book down at the foot of the bed. She flipped it open to the first chapter as he floated over to the spot she had designated for him. Then, she kept walking, and settled herself at the headboard.

If he even tried to make fun of her for it, she reasoned, she could always just close the book. It wasn’t like he could take it somewhere else to read.

The dim orange light of sunset filtering through the bedroom windows was quickly fading into dusk, as Blake and Sun continued to read in relative peace.

She quickly found that the arrangement, albeit a bit strange to get used to, was working better for her than she had thought. Every so often, Sun would quietly ask her to turn the page; to which she would lean forward, and flip the paper he was looking at. He hadn’t made any comments about the book’s contents, either, which suited her just fine.

The quiet didn’t last very long, however.

“So you like to read, huh?” Sun asked. He lounged at her feet, laid out on his stomach across the sheets. The ethereal glow clinging to his skin spread out from the place he occupied like a puddle, spreading out to brighten the dark gray of her blankets.

In front of him, _Violet’s Garden_ was flipped open to the second chapter. His fingers were submerged into the paper as though he had been pretending to hold the cover, but had neglected to keep his form from sinking too close to the solid surface.

She had sensed that he hadn’t been reading for some time. She was familiar with what another’s attention felt like on her skin, and Sun hadn’t asked her to turn the page for him since she had started the chapter she was currently on, and nearly finished with.

Blake eyed him from over the edge of her book. “Yeah,” she answered. She waited a beat, and then continued, “I went to the library after school a lot, when I was younger.”

“Why’s that?”

She didn’t want to say _because I wanted to avoid the ghosts on the sidewalk_ , but it was hard for her to come up with a lie in the moment when Sun was watching her so expectantly.

So she told him the truth. “There weren’t any spirits there,” she said. “Books were an easy escape for me. And I like reading, more than watching shows or movies.”

Sun’s eyes moved towards the book laid open in front of him. 

The twinge flaring in her chest flickered and fought to make itself known to her. She put her book in her lap, before pulling her feet back to cross her legs. 

“Want me to turn the page?” she asked.

Sun looked at her, before he shook his head. “Nah. I’ve still got to get through this part.”

She nodded, and returned her focus to her own book. It was the climax, with an army of animals and humans, hundreds of thousands strong, preparing to fight each other to the death. 

“I don’t remember if I liked to read,” Sun spoke up again.

Blake drew her eyes away from the page to look at him. Then, she quirked a brow as she studied his bemused expression.

“You said earlier that you liked, and I quote, ‘trashy novels’,” she said. 

Sun nodded. “I mean…I don’t remember why,” he continued. He shifted to lay out, to the best of his approximation, on his side. “Or if there was anything else I liked. I think I had books when I lived here, but I don’t remember what they were.”

His gaze grew dark, despite the low evening light making his irises reflect in the dim. “I feel like I was upset when the movers took my books out of here, too.”

Blake didn’t know what to say to that. To the thought of being forced to watch strangers packing her belongings away. Judging from how heavy Sun’s stare had grown, she couldn’t imagine that it was a pleasant experience.

Before she could think of an appropriate condolence to give him, a sudden buzzing stirred through the surface of the pillow Blake was leaning on. She lowered her book down to her lap, and stretched out her fingers from the curled position they had lingered in around the cover of her book.

As she moved, she was struck with how dry her mouth was.

“I’m going to go get some water,” she informed Sun, who nodded at her. He didn’t return to staring down at his book; instead, to her surprise, he floated off of her bed, and darted down towards the living space. 

She wondered if he was planning on following her once she went downstairs, or if he had just been waiting for an opportunity to leave and find something else to do. She couldn’t imagine she was making for good company, as they sat on her bed in total silence.

When she sat up, she made to grab her Scroll, as it still vibrated with whatever notification was coming through the projection layered atop its cracked screen. 

She didn’t look at it until she had taken the few steps towards the stairs, only raising the device to flare it to life once she had reached the landing. 

Then she lingered, frozen at the top of the stairwell, as she stared at the name emblazoned atop the green and red buttons, winking slowly up at her.

_Ruby._

Blake peered down at the projection, and wondered if Ruby had somehow sensed her inquiries.

It was more likely her sister and father had told her about Blake’s questioning, but she ignored that thought, and drew in a deep breath.

Her thumb fell lightly over the hologram.

“Hello?”

She spoke once she had drawn the Scroll up closer to her face. She heard a soft intake of breath on the other line, and she waited, bracing her hand against the railing.

“Hi.”

Ruby’s voice, muffled by the technology, rose to wind through her ears.

They both remained silent just long enough for Blake to awkwardly want to run her hand through her hair, just to give herself a distraction from the strained silence.

“I heard Weiss came by the shop today,” Ruby continued, once Blake opened her mouth to say something, though she hadn’t been sure of what, just to break the silence.

“Yeah.” Blake held back a sigh that wanted to escape with the acknowledgement. 

A beat passed. “How’d it go?” was the timid question.

“It wasn’t terrible.”

She was telling the truth, as strange as it felt to admit. Spending her lunch break with Weiss and Yang hadn’t been the disaster she had thought it would be; it was the last thing she would have predicted to come out of such an event.

And part of her thought it had been…kind of fun, if she forgot about Weiss’s family background.

Ruby, meanwhile, seemed to not know how to process what Blake meant with such a short description.

“Look, Ruby—”

“I just really wanted to say I’m sorry if I made you mad! I totally get why you don’t feel comfortable around her and I just don’t want to put you in that situation again, and…”

While Ruby spoke, her words blurring together more quickly as she went, Blake started to make her way down the stairs. When the girl continued to apologize, she couldn’t help but pity her in some way. She was far too quick to put blame on herself.

As she descended, her eyes caught a flicker of movement at the base of the stairs. They rose to search for the source, and settled on small expanses of clear gray.

Sun stood in silence, watching her as she went. The hint of a smile urged one corner of his lips to tug up, towards the edge of his eye. She looked back, while keeping her expression as impassive as she could to not allow the conflicting, confusing emotions that his knowing look stirred in her mind an opportunity to slip into her voice.

Her fingers fell away from the railing as she walked to brush her hair away from her face.

“Really, it’s fine. You didn’t do anything—”

Without warning, her voice remained in the spot where she had been, hovering at her back. 

As did her heart.

The carpet brushing against sole of her foot was barely a whisper on her skin. The weightlessness which followed was a hardly a surprise, somehow; if she didn’t know better in that moment, she could have felt like she was floating. The air stirred around her, buoying the listlessness of her limbs and carding through her hair with careful and gentle fingers, while she dove forward into empty space.

It was effortless. It reminded her of an autumn leaf, separated from the branch of the spindly trees which lined the street she had grown up on, twirling and dancing down to the weed-covered earth.

“—wrong…”

As she tilted further, a white-clad arm stretched out, seemingly braced for some sort of impact. 

A distant, quiet corner of her mind wondered why that would be the case, when she felt so light.

She stared at the arm as it grew nearer at an abnormally slow rate, while her lips remained parted in mid-speech. Her Scroll drifted slowly out of her fingers, joining her voice and heart in the wind behind her, as she moved. Her body angled forward like a diver in a careful arc.

The floor was rising up to meet her, to catch her, and she questioned which would reach her first: the solid ground, or the hand splayed out towards her shoulder.

She passed through the arm as though it were blue-tinged smoke. She heard a shout.

Then a crack.

And then blissful silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by a Singaporean restaurant I used to go to when I was younger. Much like Weiss, I have a low tolerance for spice, so I had fun forcing that unfortunate trait onto her so Blake could make fun of her for it.
> 
> I also shamelessly stole the titles for Blake's books from ones that are either from the RWBY fairytale compendium, or from RWBY Chibi. Making up titles and synopses is the bane of my existence and, surprisingly, the RWBY wiki has an entire page dedicated to literature in the canon lore.


End file.
